Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally
when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use …

Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans
also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of …

When perceptually available information is scant, we can leverage logical connections
among hypotheses to draw reliable conclusions that guide our reasoning and learning. We …

For more than two decades, researchers have argued that young children do not understand
mental states such as beliefs. Part of the evidence for this claim comes from preschoolers' …

Infants look longer and explore more following violations-of-expectation, but the reasons for
these surprise-induced behaviors are unclear. One possibility is that expectancy violations …

Although primates and other animals seem to have some understanding of mind (that is, the
behavior of others), the concept of belief seems to be a specifically human ability …

Given the overwhelming quantity of information available from the environment, how do
young learners know what to learn about and what to ignore? We found that 11-month-old …

Traditionally, research on early physical reasoning has focused on the simple types of
physical events our distant human ancestors routinely observed and produced as they …

Recent investigations of early psychological understanding have revealed three key
findings. First, young infants attribute goals and dispositions to any entity they perceive as an …

One of the most distinctive characteristics of humans is the capacity to learn from what other
people tell them. Often new information is provided about an entity that is not present …