Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B…

Recent studies have found that infants show relational learning in the first year. Like older children, they can abstract relations such as "same" or "different" across a series of exemplars. For older children, language has a major impact on relational learning: labeling a shared relation facilitates learning, while labeling…

Past research has shown a discrepancy in young infants' use of height information in occlusion and containment events--a pattern typically accounted for by event categorization and rule learning. Broadening these theories, the present experiment examined the role of comparison in young infants' reasoning about physical events. We rotated a typical…