The plan

Willem Frankenhuis and I had a plan — to test his hypothesis with Alison Gopnik that children who experience adversity shift from exploring the world to exploiting it earlier in life. We proposed to use unconventional behavioral genetic methods.

My family had a plan too. My kids would take gap years to join on our grand adventure. 

The reality

I knew to not get too tied to plans.

After we finalized our sabbatical arrangements, my kids decided to go straight to college instead. I was crushed to lose our final-hurrah year together — and bursting with joy for them.  

At IAS, soup brought innovative minds from around the world to our cozy lunch table. I came home buzzing with ideas from discussions each day. About budworm outbreaks. Digital twins. Who would be trusted to deliver a mental health intervention in Rwanda? Alternate systems of governance that better reflect the will of the people. Squatters in Amsterdam and what they saved of the city. Network models of science interest and psychopathology. Feral cats in Rome. How to sustain economies and societies in the midst of full-scale invasion. Surprising causes of school segregation. The shaky foundation for claims of a filter bubble in society. What counts as an explanation? Simple steps we can take to make self-control easier in our daily lives.

Our discussions inspired Katherine Hamilton and me to start an IAS book club. We wanted to bring people together across the interdisciplinary groups who work in the building on different days. I hesitated at first with the time commitment. But this was one of the best decisions I made. The books — by Dutch authors or about Dutch history — and our discussions about them have stayed with me, particularly Revolusi and the question of whether we are now colonizing the future.

Beyond the walls of Oude Turfmarkt 147

The city brought its own surprises. I'd been to Amsterdam a half dozen times, but never around Christmas, watching crowds gather outside our apartment to welcome Sinterklaas on his boat parade up the Amstel. Never for New Year's Eve just before the ban on personal fireworks took effect. Small fires burned on every block on our walk home from Museumplein celebrations. The first week of January brought more snow days to the city than each of the prior five years. I rowed on the Amstel most weeks otherwise, which I found to be deceptively complex.

I loved walking debates about meta-science with Denny, wide-ranging teas with Han, conversations with Maartje that built on decades of intellectual kinship, and warm family connections with Reinout in Haarlem and Willem in Monnickendam.

Our IAS gatherings spanned countries – dinner with Igor in Rome, staying with Sven in Cologne, and hosting Kyuri after I returned home to Davis.

Beyond comfort zones

IAS encouraged us to step outside our comfort zones — and supported me through leaps outside of mine.

In my kick-off talk, I spoke less about what I know about developing self control and more about potential links with research happening at IAS. Two people reached out in the weeks after, with simulations they developed based on ideas I presented. 

Kyuri Park and I are now exploring a formal model of my theory of children's executive function development. The model captures key phenomena of stability and change. It demonstrates how stable individual differences can arise early in development in the absence of inherent capacity differences, based on the estimated cost and value of engaging executive function and small differences in experience. The model also shows protracted development of executive function and transient changes in response to context. 

In another unanticipated collaboration, Sofija Kostić and Maartje Raijmakers invited me to join their project on children's science learning. Findings from this study suggest that cognitive flexibility plays a key role in how children revise and apply rules in response to evidence.

My project with Willem is progressing. It got stretched by input from experts across disciplines at IAS — who think about exploration and exploitation and adversity from computational, biological, psychological, ecological, developmental, and cross-cultural perspectives. We are putting this all together in a registered report. Our collaboration also benefitted from a symposium we organized on Adapting to an Unpredictable World: How Do our Theories, Models, and Measures Rise to the Challenge?

The challenge of adapting to an unpredictable world hit close to home. My time in Amsterdam brought a sudden personal loss. I was not positioned to share the news then. But without knowing, everyone in the IAS community provided nourishment through our interactions. 

IAS leadership and staff — Huub, Julia, Edwina, Merel, Jayshri, Carina, and Ana — made everything possible, fostering a welcoming and stimulating environment and providing fantastic support through events routine and unprecedented. 

For all these reasons, I think of my time at IAS with a gasp — and with deep gratitude. Everything that came from it is a work in progress, offering opportunities for exploration beyond what I could have imagined. 

Publications

Park, K. & Munakata, Y. (in progress). Individual Differences in Executive Function Can Emerge Without Neurodevelopmental Capacity Differences: A Developing Expected Value of Control Model.

Kostić, S, Munakata, Y., & Raijmakers, M.E.J. (in progress). How to Make Preschoolers Little Scientists? Not Rule-Switching but Rule Construction is the Limiting Factor.

Munakata, Y., Jiang, L., Gustavson, D., & Frankenhuis, W. (in progress). Does Early Life Adversity Accelerate the Developmental Shift from Exploration to Exploitation? A Behavioral Genetic Investigation.