
Adena SchachnerUniversity of California, San Diego | UCSD · Department of Psychology
Adena Schachner
PhD, Harvard University
About
52
Publications
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Introduction
I don't get notifications from here -- please instead look for full text on my website first: madlab.ucsd.edu, and on psyArXiv https://osf.io/preprints/discover?q=%22Adena%20Schachner%22
Additional affiliations
January 2013 - February 2016
September 2006 - December 2012
Publications
Publications (52)
How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people’s appearance and behavior to make inferences about their unobservable mental states. Here we argue that this picture is incomplete. Human behavior leaves traces in our physical...
The ability to infer others’ prosocial vs. antisocial behavioral tendencies from minimal information is core to social reasoning. Aesthetic motivation (the value or appreciation of aesthetic beauty) is linked with prosocial tendencies, raising the question of whether this factor is used in interpersonal reasoning and in the attribution of mental ca...
Similarity of behaviors or attributes is often used to infer social affiliation and prosociality. Does this reflect reasoning using a simple expectation of homophily, or more complex reasoning about shared utility? We addressed this question by examining the inferences children make from similar choices when this similarity does or does not cause c...
Many studies argue that synchronized movement increases prosocial attitudes and behavior. We reviewed meta-analytic evidence that reported effects of synchrony may be driven by experimenter expectancy, leading to experimenter bias; and participant expectancy, otherwise known as placebo effects. We found that a majority of published studies do not a...
Without conscious thought, listeners link events in the world to sounds they hear. We study one surprising example: Adults can judge the temperature of water simply from hearing it being poured. We test development of the ability to hear water temperature, with the goal of informing developmental theories regarding the origins and cognitive bases o...
Without conscious thought, listeners link events in the world to sounds they hear. We study one surprising example: Adults can judge the temperature of water simply from hearing it being poured. We test the development of the ability to hear water temperature, with the goal of informing developmental theories regarding the origins and cognitive bas...
A growing literature shows that music increases prosocial behavior. Why does this occur? We propose a novel hypothesis, informed by moral psychology: evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by leading us to judge musical individuals as having enhanced moral standing. This effect may be largely indirect, by increasing perceptions of...
How do people detect lies from the content of messages, and design lies that go undetected? Lying requires strategic reasoning about how others think and respond. We propose a unified framework underlying lie design and detection, formalized as recursive social reasoning. Senders design lies by inferring the likelihood the receiver detects potentia...
How do people detect lies from the content of messages, and design lies that go undetected? Lying requires strategic reasoning about how others think and respond. We propose a unified framework underlying lie design and detection, formalized as recursive social reasoning. Senders design lies by inferring the likelihood the receiver detects potentia...
When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations acro...
Pietraszewski proposes four triadic “primitives” for representing social groups. We argue that, despite surface differences, these triads can all be reduced to similar underlying welfare trade-off ratios, which are a better candidate for social group primitives. Welfare trade-off ratios also have limitations, however, and we suggest there are multi...
A growing literature shows that music increases prosocial behavior. Why does this occur? We propose a novel hypothesis, informed by moral psychology: evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by leading us to judge musical individuals as having enhanced moral standing. This effect may be largely indirect, by increasing perceptions of...
We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.'s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute (1) our social bonding hypothesis, (2) byproduct hypotheses, and (3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of music...
In 2020, millions of children shifted to using video chat for core aspects of education and social interaction. While video chat allows for genuine social interaction – in which the partner can see and hear you – affordances in other modalities are limited (e.g. touch). Do children understand the nuanced affordances and limitations of video chat? H...
We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.’s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute 1) our social bonding hypothesis, 2) byproduct hypotheses, and 3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicali...
In 2020, millions of children shifted to using video chat for core aspects of education and social interaction. While video chat allows for genuine social interaction—in which the partner can see and hear you—affordances in other modalities are limited (e.g., touch). Do children understand the nuanced affordances and limitations of video chat? Here...
Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We ask whether high-level causal reasoning about how music was generated can lead people to link musical sounds with animate agents. To test this, we asked whether people (N=60) make flexible inferences about whether an agent caused musical sounds, integrating informat...
Artifacts – the objects we own, make, and choose – provide a source of rich social information. Adults use people’s artifacts to judge others’ traits, interests, and social affiliations. Here we show that 4-year-old children (N=32) infer others’ shared interests from their artifacts. When asked who had the same interests as a target character, chil...
Although most U.S. children can accurately count sets by 4 years of age, many fail to understand the structural analogy between counting and number - that adding 1 to a set corresponds to counting up 1 word in the count list. While children are theorized to establish this Structure Mapping coincident with learning how counting is used to generate s...
Although most U.S. children can accurately count sets by 4 years of age, many fail to understand the structural analogy between counting and number — that adding 1 to a set corresponds to counting up 1 word in the count list. While children are theorized to establish this Structure Mapping coincident with learning how counting is used to generate s...
Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these th...
A large body of theoretical and experimental work has argued that synchronized movement among people increases prosocial attitudes and behavior. Here we review prior and new evidence that reported effects of synchrony may be driven by experimenter expectancy, leading to experimenter bias; and participant expectancy, otherwise known as placebo effec...
How do children reason about people presented over video chat? Video chat is a representation, like a picture; but is also a real social interaction (the partner sees and hears you). Do children understand the nuanced affordances and limitations of video chat? We tested 4-year-old children’s reasoning, asking if a person over video chat (vs. a live...
People design their speech acts with their listeners in mind, accounting for their knowledge and other mental states. Is this ability specific to spoken language and co-speech gesture, or does it appear in pantomimic gestures as well? We ask whether adults flexibly shift their silent gestures to emphasize relevant information, representing differen...
Do children use objects to infer the people and actions that created them? We ask how children judge whether designs were socially transmitted (copied), asking if children use a simple perceptual heuristic (more similar = more likely copied), or make a rational, flexible inference (Bayesian inverse planning). We found evidence that children use inv...
Without conscious thought, listeners link events in the world to sounds they hear. We study one surprising example: Adults can judge the temperature of water simply from hearing it being poured. How do these nuanced perceptual skills develop? Is extensive auditory experience required, or are these skills present in early childhood? In Exp.1, adults...
Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these th...
Across taxa, the forms of vocal signals are shaped by their functions. In humans, a salient context of vocal signaling is infant care, as human infants are altricial. Humans often produce "parent-ese", speech and song for infants that differ acoustically from ordinary speech and song, in fashions that are thought to support parent-infant communicat...
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...
A growing literature shows that music drives prosocial behavior (Clarke, DeNora, & Vuoskoski, 2015). Why does this occur? We propose a novel hypothesis: Evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by affecting judgments of others’ moral worth (where others fall on the continuum of moral standing, see Goodwin, 2015). If so, simply knowin...
Without conscious thought, listeners link events in the world to sounds they hear. We study one surprising example: Adults can judge the temperature of water simply from hearing it being poured. How do these nuanced perceptual skills develop? Is extensive auditory experience required, or are these skills present in early childhood? In Exp.1, adults...
The human ability to deceive others and detect deception has long been tied to theory of mind. We make a stronger argument: in order to be adept liars – to balance gain (i.e. maximizing their own reward) and plausibility (i.e. maintaining a realistic lie) – humans calibrate their lies under the assumption that their partner is a rational, utility-m...
How do people use human-made objects (artifacts) to learn about the people and actions that created them? We test the richness of people’s reasoning in this domain, focusing on the task of judging whether social transmission has occurred (i.e. whether one person copied another). We develop a formal model of this reasoning process as a form of ratio...
Music perception involves extracting meaning from sound. How does this occur? Ecological approaches suggest a role of everyday acoustic experience(Clarke, 2005): Without conscious thought, listeners link events in the world to sounds they hear. We study one surprising example: Adults can judge the temperature of water simply from hearing it being p...
People often believe that orderly structures were created by agents. We examine the cognitive basis of this tendency, and its malleability, focusing on orderly musical sounds as a case of interest. If simple associations mediate the link between order and agents, then detection of orderly stimuli should lead people to infer the presence of agents,...
People often believe that orderly structures were created by agents. We examine the cognitive basis of this tendency, asking if learned associations or causal reasoning drives us to link order with agents. Causal reasoning predicts that knowledge of an alternative physical-mechanical cause should ‘explain away’ orderliness, weakening the link with...
Human-made objects (artifacts) often provide rich social information about the people who created them. We explore how people reason about others from the objects they create, characterizing inferences about when social transmission of ideas (copying) has occurred. We test whether judgments are driven by perceptual heuristics, or structured explana...
Young children regularly engage in musical activities, but the effects of early music education on children's cognitive development are unknown. While some studies have found associations between musical training in childhood and later nonmusical cognitive outcomes, few randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been employed to assess causal effects...
Recent reports have suggested that many published results are unreliable. To increase the reliability and accuracy of published papers, multiple changes have been proposed, such as changes in statistical methods. We support such reforms. However, we believe that the incentive structure of scientific publishing must change for such reforms to be suc...
Bregman and colleagues describe methods for testing whether horses entrain their actions to an auditory beat. If horses can entrain, does this necessarily imply that there is no causal relationship between vocal learning and entrainment? I propose an alternative way in which vocal learning may relate to entrainment – one that is consistent with ent...
Adults across cultures speak to infants in a specific infant-directed manner. We asked whether infants use this manner of speech (infant- or adult-directed) to guide their subsequent visual preferences for social partners. We found that 5-month-old infants encode an individuals' use of infant-directed speech and adult-directed speech, and use this...
We have recently found robust evidence of motor entrainment to auditory stimuli in multiple species of non-human animal, all of which were capable of vocal mimicry. In contrast, the ability remained markedly absent in many closely related species incapable of vocal mimicry. This suggests that vocal mimicry may be a necessary precondition for entrai...
The human capacity for music consists of certain core phenomena, including the tendency to entrain, or align movement, to an external auditory pulse [1-3]. This ability, fundamental both for music production and for coordinated dance, has been repeatedly highlighted as uniquely human [4-11]. However, it has recently been hypothesized that entrainme...