Sixteen-month-old infants (N= 83) rationally used sparse data about the distribution of
outcomes among agents and objects to solve a fundamental inference problem: deciding …

A 4-month-old accidentally brushes a stuffed bee with a bell in it. Surprised and delighted by
the sound, he repeatedly bats at the bee making the bell ring again and again. A scientist …

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 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 …

We investigated the origins and interrelations of causal knowledge and knowledge of
agency in 3-month-old infants, who cannot yet effect changes in the world by reaching for …

We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make
accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task …

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 …

Preschoolers use outcomes of actions to infer causal properties of objects. We asked
whether they also use them to infer others' causal abilities and knowledge. In Experiment 1 …

How do infants and young children learn about the causal structure of the world around
them? In 4 experiments we investigate whether young children initially give special weight to …

Infants understand that people pursue goals, but how do they learn which goals people
prefer? We tested whether infants solve this problem by inverting a mental model of action …