Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a…

From limited evidence, children track the regularities of their language impressively fast and they infer generalized rules that apply to novel instances. This study investigated what drives the inductive leap from memorizing specific items and statistical regularities to extracting abstract rules. We propose an innovative entropy model that…

Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's…

Evaluating individuals based on their pro- and anti-social behaviors is fundamental to successful human interaction. Recent research suggests that even preverbal infants engage in social evaluation; however, it remains an open question whether infants' judgments are driven uniquely by an analysis of the mental states that motivate others' helpful…

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction…

Body movement provides a rich source of cues about other people's goals and intentions. In the present research, we investigate how well people can distinguish between different social intentions on the basis of movement information. Participants observed a model reaching toward and grasping a wooden block with the intent to cooperate with a…

Previous research has revealed that infants can reason correctly about single-event probabilities with small but not large set sizes (Bonatti, 2008; Teglas "et al.", 2007). The current study asks whether infants can make predictions regarding single-event probability with large set sizes using a novel procedure. Infants completed two trials: A…

This study examined the temporal characteristics of event-related brain electrical activity associated with the processing of spatial memories derived from linguistic and tactile information. Participants learned a map by (1) reading a text description of the map, (2) touching a wooden topological representation of the map (hidden from view), or…

A neural model is developed to explain how humans can approach a goal object on foot while steering around obstacles to avoid collisions in a cluttered environment. The model uses optic flow from a 3-dimensional virtual reality environment to determine the position of objects on the basis of motion discontinuities and computes heading direction,…

This article addresses the issue of whether the remember-know (RK) task is best explained by a single-process or a dual-process model. All single-process models propose that remember and know responses reflect different levels of a single strength-of-evidence dimension. Thus, across conditions in which response criteria are held constant, these…

Skilled behavior requires a balance between previously successful behaviors and new behaviors appropriate to the present context. We describe a dynamic field model for understanding this balance in infant perseverative reaching. The model predictions are tested with regard to the interaction of two aspects of the typical perseverative reaching…

Various studies have shown that infants in their first year of life are able to interpret human actions as goal-directed. It is argued that this understanding is a precondition for understanding intentional actions and attributing mental states. Moreover, some authors claim that this early action understanding is a precursor of later Theory of…

Infants' apparent failure in gaze-following tasks is often interpreted as a sign of lack of understanding the referential nature of looking. In the present study, 8- and 12-month-old infants followed the gaze of a model to one of two locations hidden from their view by occluders. When the occluders were removed, an object was revealed either at…

Five experiments explored the effects of immediate repetition priming on episodic recognition (the "Jacoby-Whitehouse effect") as measured with forced-choice testing. These experiments confirmed key predictions of a model adapted from D. E. Huber and R. C. O'Reilly's (2003) dynamic neural network of perception. In this model, short prime durations…

Two experiments explored the existence and the development of relations between action representations and object representations. A priming paradigm was used in which participants viewed an action pantomime followed by the picture of a tool, the tool being either associated or unassociated with the preceding action. Overall, we observed that the…