From about 7 months of age onward, infants start to reliably fixate the goal of an observed action, such as a grasp, before the action is complete. The available research has identified a variety of factors that influence such goal-anticipatory gaze shifts, including the experience with the shown action events and familiarity with the observed…

Computational models of child language development can help us understand the cognitive underpinnings of the language learning process, which occurs along several linguistic levels at once (e.g., prosodic and phonological). However, in light of the replication crisis, modelers face the challenge of selecting representative and consolidated infant…

This study investigates the acquisition of integrated object manipulation and categorization abilities through a series of experiments in which human adults and artificial agents were asked to learn to manipulate two-dimensional objects that varied in shape, color, weight, and color intensity. The analysis of the obtained results and the…

Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, but, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear; while target variability has been shown to facilitate word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here, we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection…

Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection. The present study investigated whether such beliefs are impediments to learning this concept as well. Participants (43 children aged 4-9 and 34 adults) were asked to judge the variability of various behavioral and…

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and…

This study discusses findings that replicate and extend the original work of Burns and Vollmeyer (2002), which showed that performance in problem-solving tasks was more accurate when people were engaged in a non-specific goal than in a specific goal. The main innovation here was to examine the goal specificity effect under both observation-based…

Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) [Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. "Psychological Review," 109 (1), 75-90] found evidence for the use of the recognition heuristic. For example, if an individual recognizes only one of two cities, they tend to infer that the recognized city has a larger population. A prediction…