Childhood is a key period for acquiring and transmitting cultural knowledge and skill. Hunter-gatherer children, such as the Congolese BaYaka, learn a…

Abstract. Across cultures, humans reason about others’ mental states as being either phenomenal, reflecting shareable experiences, or intentional, reflecting agentive goals. Might our dissociated judg...

The ability to learn and apply rules lies at the heart of cognition. In a seminal study, Marcus et al. (1999) reported that 7-month-old infants learned abstract rules over syllable sequences and were...

The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.

Abstract. Even young toddlers coordinate actions with a partner. But coordinating choices or decisions is more challenging, particularly in multi-party gro

Research has established that children are “naive psychologists,” adept at understanding and navigating the social world from an early age. However, most of thi...

Abstract. The term 5- to 7-year shift refers to the marked changes in behavior observed as children transition from preschool age to school age. In 1996, a

Weber's law is a rare quantitative regularity in psychology, yet its origins remain debated. Here we provide causal evidence that it arises from the more fundamental principle of efficient coding. Thi...

We are preparing substantial changes to OSF that will reduce its functionality, focus OSF on its unique strengths, and move toward an integrated model with complementary services. As part of that shif...

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general…

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

How does complex cognition emerge from simpler underlying processes? We show that two components are sufficient: infant-like curiosity and brain-like biophysical constraints jointly drive the emergenc...

Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...

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Abstract. Can you perform an action intentionally if there was only a small chance your action would succeed? Researchers studying the folk concept of intentional action have documented complex…

Abstract. A recent study by Thomas et al. (2022) showed that 8.5- to 10-month-olds use saliva sharing as an indicator of relationship closeness: infants ex

People generally only engage in reciprocal generosity with others of equal or unknown status, MIT researchers experimentally demonstrated. During repeated interactions between people of different soci...

We argue that intentionalist accounts of ostensive-inferential communication fail to adequately explain the role of external representations in human communication. We propose that the contents of a ...