Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists--such as Einstein--do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we…

Infants have shown variable success in quantity comparison tasks, with infants of a given age sometimes successfully discriminating numerical differences at a 2:3 ratio but requiring 1:2 and even 1:4 ratios of change at other times. The current explanations for these variable results include the two-systems proposal--a theoretical framework that…

The present research examined whether 3-month-old infants, the youngest found so far to engage in goal-related reasoning about human agents, would also act as if they attribute goals to a novel non-human agent, a self-propelled box. In two experiments, the infants seemed to have interpreted the box's actions as goal-directed after seeing the box…

Why do people perseverate, repeating prior behaviours that are no longer appropriate? Many accounts point to isolated deficits in processes such as inhibition or attention. We instead posit a fundamental difference in rule representations: flexible switchers use active representations that rely on later-developing prefrontal cortical areas and are…

For adults, prior information about an individual's likely goals, preferences or dispositions plays a powerful role in interpreting ambiguous behavior and predicting and interpreting behavior in novel contexts. Across two studies, we investigated whether 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of an ambiguous action sequence was…

Research has shown that preschoolers monitor others' prior accuracy and prefer to learn from individuals who have the best track record. We investigated the scope of preschoolers' attributions based on an individual's prior accuracy. Experiment 1 revealed that 5-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) used an individual's prior accuracy at labelling to…

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis according to which theory of mind competence was a prerequisite to ambiguous idioms understanding. We hypothesized that the child needs to understand that the literal interpretation could be a false world representation, a false belief, and that the speaker's intention is to mean something else, to…

Prior research suggests that infants attend to a variable in an event category when they have identified it as relevant for predicting outcomes in the category, and that the age at which infants identify a variable depends largely on the age at which they are exposed to appropriate observations. Thus, depending on age of exposure, infants may…