Gala Stojnic

New York University | NYU · Department of Psychology

Human infants are fascinated by other people. They bring to this fascination a constellation of rich and flexible expectations about the intentions motivating people’s actions. Here we test 11-month-old infants and state-of-the-art learning-driven neural-network models on the “Baby Intuitions Benchmark (BIB),” a suite of tasks challenging both infa...

This chapter focuses on the problem of concept composition: to obtain a complex concept such as RED SQUARE, the mind has to be able to combine simple concepts, RED and SQUARE. It is argued here that compositionality constraint is a necessary element of any cognitively plausible theory of concepts. The chapter provides an overview of the theories of...

To achieve human-like common sense about everyday life, machine learning systems must understand and reason about the goals, preferences, and actions of others. Human infants intuitively achieve such common sense by making inferences about the underlying causes of other agents' actions. Directly informed by research on infant cognition, our benchma...

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to take the flawed intelligence of humans out of machines. Why, then, might we want to put the inchoate intelligence of human infants into machines? While infants seem to intuit others’ underlying intentions merely by observing their actions, AI systems, in contrast, fall short in such commonsense psychology. H...

The present handbook is a state-of-the-art compilation of papers from leading scholars on the mental lexicon—the representation of language in the mind/brain at the level of individual words and meaningful sub-word units. In recent years, the study of words as mental objects has grown rapidly across several fields including linguistics, psychology,...