Abstract. When someone acts generously, what expectations does this create? Classic theories and experiments emphasize reciprocity: the idea that generosity will be returned by the recipient. Yet…

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...

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Recent research has highlighted how visual narrative sequences involve similar structures and processing as syntax in language, yet no work has asked …

Abstract. How do urban environments shape the way people conceptualize and communicate space? Using a cultural transmission experiment in virtual reality, we asked participants to navigate one of two ...

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

We know that trees are good for cities. A new study finds that mature trees are especially good.

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LLMs need vastly more data than children to learn language. Understanding why could help us create more efficient models—and reveal more about developing minds.

Child-directed speech (CDS) varies systematically with the recipient child’s age. The present study examined whether children aged 3–6 years are sensitive to this within-register variation and use ...

Sighted people rely on vision to recognize and navigate the local environment. By adulthood, human cortex contains at least three regions that resp...

Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...

ICML 2026 invited keynote — slides and edited transcript, presented click-by-click as delivered. Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University.

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...

Children as agents of cultural adaptation - Volume 49

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

Abstract. Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have

Children acquire object category representations from their everyday experiences in the first few years of life. What do the inputs to this learning process look like? We analyzed first-person videos ...

This study investigated whether children exhibit gendered expectations and evaluations of empathy, exploring the developmental origins of stereotypes observed in adults. A sample of 112 children (M...