Generic language (e.g., "tigers have stripes") leads children to assume that the referenced category (e.g., tigers) is inductively informative and provides a causal explanation for the behavior of individual members. In two preregistered studies with 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 497), we considered the mechanisms underlying these…

The ability to learn cause-effect relations from experience is critical for humans to behave adaptively -- to choose causes that bring about desired effects. However, traditional experiments on experience-based learning involve events that are artificially compressed in time so that all learning occurs over the course of minutes. These paradigms…

Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept…

How does the act of explaining influence learning? Prior work has studied effects of explaining through a predominantly proximal lens, measuring short-term outcomes or manipulations within lab settings. Here, we ask whether the benefits of explaining extend to academic performance over time. Specifically, does the quality and frequency of student…

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward "category clustering" is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one…

Although "Girls are as good as boys at math" explicitly expresses equality, we predict it could nevertheless suggest that boys have more raw talent. In statements with this subject-complement structure, the item in the complement position serves as the reference point and is thus considered more typical and prominent. This explains why…

Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2- to 6-year-old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations…

Some researchers on binary choice inference have argued that people make inferences based on simple heuristics, such as recognition, fluency, or familiarity. Others have argued that people make inferences based on available knowledge. To examine the boundary between heuristic and knowledge usage, we examine binary choice inference processes in…

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge--an interconnected causal "network," where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms--causal "islands"--such that events in different…

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as…

This article reports results from two studies of how people answer counterfactual questions about simple machines. Participants learned about devices that have a specific configuration of components, and they answered questions of the form "If component X had not operated [failed], would component Y have operated?" The data from these…

Questions concerning mediated causal effects are of great interest in psychology, cognitive science, medicine, social science, public health, and many other disciplines. For instance, about 60% of recent papers published in leading journals in social psychology contain at least one mediation test (Rucker, Preacher, Tormala, & Petty, 2011).…

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in…

Conditionals somehow express conditional beliefs. However, conditional belief is a bi-propositional attitude that is generally not truth-evaluable, in contrast to unconditional belief. Therefore, this article opts for an expressivistic semantics for conditionals, grounds this semantics in the arguably most adequate account of conditional belief,…

It has been shown that, when observing an action, infants can rely on either outcome selection information (i.e., actions that express a choice between potential outcomes) or means selection information (i.e., actions that are causally efficient toward the outcome) in their goal attribution. However, no research has investigated the relationship…