Motivated by computational analyses, we look at how teaching affects exploration and discovery. In Experiment 1, we investigated children's exploratory play after an adult pedagogically demonstrated a function of a toy, after an interrupted pedagogical demonstration, after a naive adult demonstrated the function, and at baseline. Preschoolers in…

People cannot veridically perceive reflections of objects as projections on the surface of mirrors. People tried to locate an object's projection on a flat mirror. The observer stood at the opposite end of a long mirror to the experimenter. They were told to remember the location of the projection of the experimenter's face. The experimenter then…

Viewing objects with the intention to act upon them may activate task-irrelevant motor responses. Many manufactured objects are associated with two action classes: grasping in accordance with object structure and skillful use consistent with object function. We studied the potential for within-object competition during action selection by…

At near-threshold levels of stimulation, identical stimulus parameters can result in very different phenomenal experiences. Can we manipulate which stimuli reach consciousness? Here we show that consciousness of otherwise masked stimuli can be experimentally induced by sensory entrainment. We preceded a backward-masked stimulus with a series of…

Children are ubiquitous imitators, but how do they decide which actions to imitate? One possibility is that children rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are necessary to cause a particular outcome. For instance, children might learn from contingencies between action sequences and outcomes across repeated…

Various studies have demonstrated enhanced visual processing when information is presented across both visual hemifields rather than in a single hemifield (the "bilateral advantage"). For example, Alvarez and Cavanagh (2005) reported that observers were able to track twice as many moving visual stimuli when the tracked items were presented…

There is strong evidence that we automatically simulate observed behavior in our motor system. Previous research suggests that this simulation process depends on whether we observe a human or a non-human agent. Measuring a motor priming effect, this study investigated the question of whether agent-sensitivity of motor simulation depends on the…