Many cognitive theories have described behavior as the summation of independent contributions from separate components. Contrasting views have emphasized the importance of multiplicative interactions and emergent structure. We describe a statistical approach to distinguishing additive and multiplicative processes and apply it to the dynamics of…

A crucial task in social interaction involves understanding subjective mental states. Here we report two experiments with toddlers exploring whether they can use statistical evidence to infer the subjective nature of preferences. We found that 2-year-olds were likely to interpret another person's nonrandom sampling behavior as a cue for a…