As adults, we do not expect ignorant agents to behave randomly or always get things wrong. Instead, we expect them to act reasonably, guided by past experiences. We test whether 4-to-6-year-olds share this intuition and use it to infer others' knowledge, or whether they rely on a simple "ignorance = error" heuristic identified in past…

Children rely on their Approximate Number System to intuitively perceive number. Such adaptations often exhibit sensitivity to real-world statistics. This study investigates a potential manifestation of the ANS's sensitivity to real-world statistics: a negative power-law distribution of objects in natural scenes should be reflected in children's…

Two studies explored preschool children's beliefs about the relationship between perceptually based similarity among things and their predicted behaviors by focusing on form-function correspondences. Perceptual similarity, if motivated by intuitive beliefs about correspondences between form and function was found to be sufficient basis for…