We propose that human social cognition is structured around a basic understanding of
ourselves and others as intuitive utility maximizers: from a young age, humans implicitly …

Social learning is often portrayed as a passive process of copying and trusting others. This
view, however, does not fully capture what makes human social learning so powerful: social …

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn
and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained …

Social cognition depends on our capacity for 'mentalizing', or explaining an agent's
behaviour in terms of their mental states. The development and neural substrates of …

We review the idea that Theory of Mind—our ability to reason about other people's mental
states—can be formalized as inverse reinforcement learning. Under this framework …

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 …

The human ability to reason about the causes behind other people'behavior is critical for
navigating the social world. Recent empirical research with both children and adults …

Young children develop causal knowledge through everyday family conversations and
activities. Children's museums are an informative setting for studying the social context of …

From early childhood, humans demonstrate an understanding of ownership and the rights it
confers to owners. This understanding impacts how children reason about people's actions …

Direct instruction facilitates learning without the costs of exploration, yet teachers must be
selective because not everything can nor needs to be taught. How do we decide what to …