Research

What expectations do acts of generosity create for future social interactions? In online behavioral experiments presenting human observers (N = 1159 English-speaking adults in the United States) with naturalistic vignettes, we find that knowing about the structure (equal or hierarchical) of an existing social relationship markedly reshapes people’s expectations for sequences of generous acts. Notably, people do not always expect reciprocal generosity. In hierarchical relationships, people …

Abstract | Punishment is a cost imposed on a target, in response to an un- desirable action. Yet choosing to punish also reveals information about the authority’s own motives and values. We propose that observers jointly infer the wrongness of the action and the authority’s motivations. Using hypothetical scenarios in un- familiar societies, we experimentally manipulated observers’ prior beliefs and measured human observers’ inferences after observing punishment. These inferences were …

Abstract | Shortly after learning to crawl or walk, toddlers successfully use vision to guide navigation through the local visual space. How does this ability develop? One hypothesis is that the emergence of navigational affordance perception depends on active navigation experience (e.g., crawling). However, this hypothesis has never been tested, as almost all prior work conflates perception of navigational affordances with the integration of this information into a motor plan. Here we …

Abstract | It is commonly believed that expressions visually signal rich diagnostic information to human observers. We studied how observers interpret the dynamic expressions that people spontaneously produced during a real-life high-stakes televised game. We find that human observers are remarkably poor at recovering what events elicited others’ facial and bodily expressions. Beyond simple inaccuracy, people’s causal reasoning exhibits systematic model-based patterns of errors. We …

Abstract | When deciding whether and how to punish, people consider not only the potential direct consequences, but also, how their choice will affect observers’ judgements about the values and motives underlying the choice. We formalize the decision to punish as a rational communicative social action (RCSA). The model generates rational decisions to punish, incorporating anticipated observers’ judgements obtained from a recursive model of inference using an intuitive theory of mind. Using this …

Abstract | From birth, humans constantly make decisions about what to look at and for how long. Yet the mechanism behind such decision-making remains poorly understood. Here we present the rational action, noisy choice for habituation (RANCH) model. RANCH is a rational learning model that takes noisy perceptual samples from stimuli and makes sampling decisions based on Expected Information Gain (EIG). The model captures key patterns of looking time documented in developmental research: …

Objective: Toddlers undergo immense changes in their language comprehension and production in a short period of time. However, compared to other age groups, we know relatively little about the neural underpinnings of language comprehension during this important developmental period, as awake toddlers are challenging to study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our goal was to create a task tailored to this age group using engaging, naturalistic stimuli, as well as adapt our …