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 …

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' …

Having repeatedly retrieved an object from a location, human infants tend to search the
same place even when they observe the object being hidden at another location. This …

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 …

Children, including infants, have expectations about the world around them, and produce
reliable responses when these expectations are violated. However, little is known about how …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Children often learn about the world through direct observation. However, much of children's
knowledge is acquired through the testimony of others. This research investigates how …

Effective curiosity-driven learning requires recognizing that the value of evidence for testing
hypotheses depends on what other hypotheses are under consideration. Do we intuitively …