Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1
Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains?
In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...
New preprint w/ @drbarner.bsky.social, and probably the most fun project I've worked on!!
Past studies find kids fail to compute scalar implicatures. Do those tasks test spontaneous interpretation, or do they proffer worlds kids would never consider? 🧵 osf.io/preprints/ps...
🚨 New preprint! 🚨
Building on our Nature Comms framework, we show that feedback shapes risk preferences across the lifespan—not always improving decisions, but sometimes inducing age-specific biases, including gambler’s fallacy in adults. osf.io/preprints/ps...
🚨 Out in Mind & Language
Inferential communication: The primacy of external representations
With @gcsibra.bsky.social, we suggest a non-Gricean mechanism for interpreting communicative media that relies on mapping symbolic arrangements onto content; we then discuss its evolutionary implications.
New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6
Hi everyone! My paper on cognitive representations of relationships and their developmental origins is finally out! I had a blast responding to the commentary and was honored to be able to engage with people who laid the foundation for my research program. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!
Preprint alert (link below)! @maxencepajot.bsky.social, @standehaene.bsky.social, and I show that human adults, but not convolutional or transformer networks, encode geometric shapes in hierarchically structured representations. TL;DR: Geometric-shape representations have internal syntax! 1/8
