How do children come to understand that others have mental representations, e.g., of an object's location? Preschoolers go through two transitions on verbal false-belief tasks, in which they have to predict where an agent will search for an object that was moved in her absence. First, while three-and-a-half-year-olds usually fail at approach…

In the behavioral sciences, a popular approach to describe and predict behavior is cognitive modeling with adjustable parameters (i.e., which can be fitted to data). Modeling with adjustable parameters allows, among other things, measuring differences between people. At the same time, parameter estimation also bears the risk of overfitting. Are…

Human adults will sometimes help without being asked to help, including in situations in which the helpee is oblivious to the problem and thus provides no communicative or behavioral cues that intervention is necessary. Some theoretical models argue that these acts of "proactive helping" are an important and possibly human-specific form of…

We present an introduction to Bayesian inference as it is used in probabilistic models of cognitive development. Our goal is to provide an intuitive and accessible guide to the "what", the "how", and the "why" of the Bayesian approach: what sorts of problems and data the framework is most relevant for, and how and why it may be useful for…

A connectionist model of the balance scale task is presented which exhibits developmental transitions between "Rule I" and "Rule II" behavior [Siegler, R. S. (1976). Three aspects of cognitive development. "Cognitive Psychology," 8, 481-520.] as well as the "catastrophe flags" seen in data from Jansen and van der Maas [Jansen, B. R. J., & van der…

Research suggests that concepts are distributed across brain regions specialized for processing information from different sensorimotor modalities. Multimodal semantic models fall into one of two broad classes differentiated by the assumed hierarchy of convergence zones over which information is integrated. In shallow models, communication within-…

Previous research suggests that perspective-taking and other "theory of mind" processes may be cognitively demanding for adult participants, and may be disrupted by concurrent performance of a secondary task. In the current study, a Level-1 visual perspective task was administered to 32 adults using a dual-task paradigm in which the secondary task…

Recent research suggests that witnessing events of fission (e.g., the splitting of a solid object) impairs human infants', human adults', and non-human primates' object representations. The present studies investigated the reactions of gorillas and orangutans to cohesion violation across different types of fission events implementing a behavioral…

Humans are adept at inferring the mental states underlying other agents' actions, such as goals, beliefs, desires, emotions and other thoughts. We propose a computational framework based on Bayesian inverse planning for modeling human action understanding. The framework represents an intuitive theory of intentional agents' behavior based on the…

Quinlan et al. [Quinlan, p., van der Mass, H., Jansen, B., Booij, O., & Rendell, M. (this issue). Re-thinking stages of cognitive development: An appraisal of connectionist models of the balance scale task. "Cognition", doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.02.004] use Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to criticize a connectionist model of development on the…

The present research examines the ability of children as young as 4 years to use models in tasks that require scaling of distance along a single dimension. In Experiment 1, we found that tasks involving models are similar in difficulty to those involving maps that we studied earlier (Huttenlocher, J., Newcombe, N., & Vasilyeva, M. (1999). Spatial…

The present paper re-appraises connectionist attempts to explain how human cognitive development appears to progress through a series of sequential stages. Models of performance on the Piagetian balance scale task are the focus of attention. Limitations of these models are discussed and replications and extensions to the work are provided via the…

The term synaesthesia has been applied to a range of different sensory-perceptual and cognitive experiences, yet how these experiences are related to each other is not well understood. Not only are there disparate types of synaesthesia, but even within types there are vast individual differences in the way that stimuli induce synaesthesia and in…

In contrast to Shultz and Takane [Shultz, T.R., & Takane, Y. (2007). Rule following and rule use in the balance-scale task. "Cognition", in press, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.12.004.] we do not accept that the traditional Rule Assessment Method (RAM) of scoring responses on the balance scale task has advantages over latent class analysis (LCA):…

Intersensory redundancy can facilitate animal and human behavior in areas as diverse as rhythm discrimination, signal detection, orienting responses, maternal call learning, and associative learning. In the realm of numerical development, infants show similar sensitivity to numerical differences in both the visual and auditory modalities. Using a…