When we reason about the goals of others, how do we balance the positive outcomes that actions led to, with the potentially bad ways those actions could have ended? In a four-part experiment, we tested whether and how adults (full study) and 6- to …
Humans have an intuitive understanding of physics. They can predict how a physical scene will unfold, and reason about how it came to be. Adults may rely on such a physical representation for visual reasoning and recognition, going beyond visual …
Constructing an intuitive theory from data confronts learners with a “chicken‐and‐egg” problem: The laws can only be expressed in terms of the theory's core concepts, but these concepts are only meaningful in terms of the role they play in the …
Infants understand that people act in order to achieve their goals, but how can they tell what goals people find worthwhile? Here, we explore the thesis that human infants solve this problem by building a mental model of action planning, taking into …
An intuitive theory is a system of abstract concepts and laws relating those concepts that together provide a framework for explaining some domain of phenomena. Constructing an intuitive theory based on observing the world, as in building a …