Causal reasoning is a fundamental cognitive ability that enables individuals to learn about the complex interactions in the world around them. However, the mechanisms that underpin causal reasoning are not well understood. For example, it remains unresolved whether children's causal inferences are best explained by Bayesian inference or…

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

If cues from different sensory modalities share the same cause, their information can be integrated to improve perceptual precision. While it is well established that adults exploit sensory redundancy by integrating cues in a Bayes optimal fashion, whether children under 8 years of age combine sensory information in a similar fashion is still…

Developmental research, like many fields, is plagued by low sample sizes and inconclusive findings. The problem is amplified by the difficulties associated with recruiting infant participants for research as well as the increased variability in infant responses. With sequential testing designs providing a viable alternative to paradigms facing…

Like scientists, children seek ways to explain causal systems in the world. But are children scientists in the strict Bayesian tradition of maximizing posterior probability? Or do they attend to other explanatory considerations, as laypeople and scientists--such as Einstein--do? Four experiments support the latter possibility. In particular, we…

Studies of infant looking times over the past 50 years have provided profound insights about cognitive development, but their dependent measures and analytic techniques are quite limited. In the context of infants' attention to discrete sequential events, we show how a Bayesian data analysis approach can be combined with a rational cognitive…

During the first year of life, infants' face recognition abilities are subject to "perceptual narrowing", the end result of which is that observers lose the ability to distinguish previously discriminable faces (e.g. other-race faces) from one another. Perceptual narrowing has been reported for faces of different species and different races, in…

Evaluating individuals based on their pro- and anti-social behaviors is fundamental to successful human interaction. Recent research suggests that even preverbal infants engage in social evaluation; however, it remains an open question whether infants' judgments are driven uniquely by an analysis of the mental states that motivate others' helpful…