Children's Understanding of How Past Experience Shapes Future Expectations.

As adults, we do not expect ignorant agents to behave randomly or always get things wrong. Instead, we expect them to act reasonably, guided by past experiences. We test whether 4-to-6-year-olds share this intuition and use it to infer others' knowledge, or whether they rely on a simple "ignorance = error" heuristic identified in past work.

People can infer the magnitude of other people's knowledge even when they cannot infer its contents.

Inferences about other people's knowledge and beliefs are central to social interaction. However, people's behavior is often consistent with a range of potential epistemic states, making it impossible to tell what exactly they know. Nonetheless, we are still often able to form coarse intuitions about how much someone knows, despite being unable to pinpoint the exact contents of their knowledge.

Six-Year-Olds, but Not Younger Children, Consider the Probability of Being Right by Chance When Inferring Others' Knowledge.

When determining what others know, we intuitively consider not only whether they succeed but also their probability of success in the absence of knowledge (e.g., random guessing).

Detecting social biases using mental state inference.

Social biases are prevalent in everyday social interactions, but they are often expressed in subtle ways that can make them difficult to detect. Yet, intuitively, people often recognize when they are the subject of a bias, even when those biases are not explicitly communicated (e.g.

Inference from social evaluation.

People have a remarkable ability to infer the hidden causes of things. From physical evidence, such as muddy footprints on the floor, we can figure out what happened and who did it. Here, we investigate another source of evidence: social evaluations.

Societal inferences from the physical world.

Moffett points to humans' use of physical markers to signal group identity as crucial to human society. We characterize the developmental and cognitive bases of this capacity, arguing that it is part of an early-emerging, intuitive which allows the inanimate world to encode rich social meaning about individuals' identities, and the values of the society as a whole.

Adolescents report being most motivated by encouragement from people who know their abilities and the domain.

Students often receive encouragement but do not always find it motivating. Whose encouragement motivates students and what cognitive mechanisms underlie this process? We propose that students' responses to positive feedback (e.g.

Tracking minds in communication.

How does social cognition help us communicate through language? At what levels does this interaction occur? In classical views, social cognition is independent of language, and integrating the two can be slow, effortful, and error-prone. But new research into word level processes reveals that communication is brimming with social micro-processes that happen in real time, guiding even the simplest choices like how we use adjectives, articles, and demonstratives. We interpret these findings in the context of advances in theoretical models of social cognition and propose a communicative mind-tracking framework, where social micro-processes are not a secondary process in how we use language - they are fundamental to how communication works.

When New Experience Leads to New Knowledge: A Computational Framework for Formalizing Epistemically Transformative Experiences.

The discovery of a new kind of experience can teach an agent what that kind of experience is like. Such a discovery can be epistemically transformative, teaching an agent something they could not have learned without having that kind of experience. However, learning something new does not always require new experience.

Perceptual, Semantic, and Pragmatic Factors Affect the Derivation of Contrastive Inferences.

People derive contrastive inferences when interpreting adjectives (e.g., inferring that 'the short pencil' is being contrasted with a longer one).

Demonstratives as attention tools: Evidence of mentalistic representations within language.

Linguistic communication is an intrinsically social activity that enables us to share thoughts across minds. Many complex social uses of language can be captured by domain-general representations of other minds (i.e.

Core knowledge, visual illusions, and the discovery of the self.

Why have core knowledge? Standard answers typically emphasize the difficulty of learning core knowledge from experience, or the benefits it confers for learning about the world. Here, we suggest a complementary reason: Core knowledge is critical for learning not just about the external world, but about the mind itself.

People Have Systematically Different Ownership Intuitions in Seemingly Simple Cases.

Our understanding of ownership influences how we interact with objects and with each other. Here, we studied people's intuitions about ownership transfer using a set of simple, parametrically varied events. We found that people ( = 120 U.

Face and context integration in emotion inference is limited and variable across categories and individuals.

The ability to make nuanced inferences about other people's emotional states is central to social functioning. While emotion inferences can be sensitive to both facial movements and the situational context that they occur in, relatively little is understood about when these two sources of information are integrated across emotion categories and individuals. In a series of studies, we use one archival and five empirical datasets to demonstrate that people could be integrating, but that emotion inferences are just as well (and sometimes better) captured by knowledge of the situation alone, while isolated facial cues are insufficient.

People's thinking plans adapt to the problem they're trying to solve.

Much of our thinking focuses on deciding what to do in situations where the space of possible options is too large to evaluate exhaustively. Previous work has found that people do this by learning the general value of different behaviors, and prioritizing thinking about high-value options in new situations. Is this good-action bias always the best strategy, or can thinking about low-value options sometimes become more beneficial? Can people adapt their thinking accordingly based on the situation? And how do we know what to think about in novel events? Here, we developed a block-puzzle paradigm that enabled us to measure people's thinking plans and compare them to a computational model of rational thought.

Diverse mathematical knowledge among indigenous Amazonians.

We investigate number and arithmetic learning among a Bolivian indigenous people, the Tsimane', for whom formal schooling is comparatively recent in history and variable in both extent and consistency. We first present a large-scale meta-analysis on child number development involving over 800 Tsimane' children. The results emphasize the impact of formal schooling: Children are only found to be full counters when they have attended school, suggesting the importance of cultural support for early mathematics.

Identifying social partners through indirect prosociality: A computational account.

The ability to identify people who are prosocial, supportive, and mindful of others is critical for choosing social partners. While past work has emphasized the information value of direct social interactions (such as watching someone help or hinder others), social tendencies can also be inferred from indirect evidence, such as how an agent considers others when making personal choices. Here we present a computational model of this capacity, grounded in a Bayesian framework for action understanding.

People can use the placement of objects to infer communicative goals.

Beyond words and gestures, people have a remarkable capacity to communicate indirectly through everyday objects: A hat on a chair can mean it is occupied, rope hanging across an entrance can mean we should not cross, and objects placed in a closed box can imply they are not ours to take. How do people generate and interpret the communicative meaning of objects? We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by social goal inference, where observers recover what social goal explains an object being placed in a particular location. To test this idea, we study a category of common ad-hoc communicative objects where a small cost is used to signal avoidance.

When Naïve Pedagogy Breaks Down: Adults Rationally Decide How to Teach, but Misrepresent Learners' Beliefs.

From early in childhood, humans exhibit sophisticated intuitions about how to share knowledge efficiently in simple controlled studies. Yet, untrained adults often fail to teach effectively in real-world situations. Here, we explored what causes adults to struggle in informal pedagogical exchanges.

Flexible Goals Require that Inflexible Perceptual Systems Produce Veridical Representations: Implications for Realism as Revealed by Evolutionary Simulations.

How veridical is perception? Rather than representing objects as they actually exist in the world, might perception instead represent objects only in terms of the utility they offer to an observer? Previous work employed evolutionary modeling to show that under certain assumptions, natural selection favors such "strict-interface" perceptual systems. This view has fueled considerable debate, but we think that discussions so far have failed to consider the implications of two critical aspects of perception. First, while existing models have explored single utility functions, perception will often serve multiple largely independent goals.

Verbal counting and the timing of number acquisition in an indigenous Amazonian group.

Children in industrialized cultures typically succeed on Give-N, a test of counting ability, by age 4. On the other hand, counting appears to be learned much later in the Tsimane', an indigenous group in the Bolivian Amazon. This study tests three hypotheses for what may cause this difference in timing: (a) Tsimane' children may be shy in providing behavioral responses to number tasks, (b) Tsimane' children may not memorize the verbal list of number words early in acquisition, and/or (c) home environments may not support mathematical learning in the same way as in US samples, leading Tsimane' children to primarily acquire mathematics through formalized schooling.

Preschoolers decide who is knowledgeable, who to inform, and who to trust via a causal understanding of how knowledge relates to action.

Preschoolers are discerning learners, preferring to trust people who are accurate, reliable, and appropriately-informed. Do these preferences reflect mental-state reasoning, where children infer what others know from their behavior, or do they reflect a reliance on simple cues? In Experiment 1 we show that four- and five-year-olds can infer knowledge from others' behavior when superficial cues and actions are matched across agents. Experiments 2a and 2b further suggest that children track how agents acquired their knowledge, and may use this to determine what different agents will (and will not) know.

Social inferences from physical evidence via bayesian event reconstruction.

Humans can make remarkable social inferences by watching each other's behavior. In many cases, however, people can also make social inferences about agents whose behavior they cannot see, based only on the physical evidence left behind. We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by a form of mental event reconstruction.

People infer communicative action through an expectation for efficient communication.

Humans often communicate using body movements like winks, waves, and nods. However, it is unclear how we identify when someone's physical actions are communicative. Given people's propensity to interpret each other's behavior as aimed to produce changes in the world, we hypothesize that people expect communicative actions to efficiently reveal that they lack an external goal.

Not just what you did, but how: Children see distributors that count as more fair than distributors who don't.

To distribute resources in a fair way, identifying an appropriate outcome is not enough: We must also find a way to produce it. To solve this problem, young children spontaneously use number words and counting in fairness tasks. We hypothesized that children are also sensitive to other people's use of counting, as it reveals that the distributor was motivated to produce the outcome they believed was fair.