Jonathan F Kominsky

Central European University | CEU · Department of Cognitive Science

Children and adults may not realize how much they depend on external sources in understanding word meanings. Four experiments investigated the existence and developmental course of a “Misplaced Meaning” (MM) effect, wherein children and adults overestimate their knowledge about the meanings of various words by underestimating how much they rely on...

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one...

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried...

Children do not just learn in the classroom. They engage in “informal learning” every day just by spending time with their family and peers. However, while researchers know this occurs, less is known about the science of this learning—how this learning works. This is so because investigators lack access to those moments of informal learning. In thi...

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judg- ments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people's judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particula...

Infancy researchers often use highly simplified, animated, or otherwise artificial stimuli to study infant’s understanding of abstract concepts including “causality” or even “prosociality”. The use of these simplified stimuli have led to questions about the validity of the resulting empirical findings. Do simplified stimuli effectively communicate...

All analysis‐based suggestions for improving infant research are limited by the quality and quantity of data that infant research methods can produce. In this commentary, I expand on Byers‐Heinlein et al. (2022)'s call for methodological innovation by discussing in more detail how we as a field can improve and encourage the improvement of our metho...

Past work has found that infants show more interest when an object that has at least two properties of animate beings, such as engaging in self‐generated motion and having fur, is shown to be hollow than when an object with none or one of these properties is revealed to be hollow. When an object is grabbed by a hand and moved to a new place, by 7 m...

General Audience Summary We investigated how people determine whether a costly public policy is an “overreaction” or an appropriate response. Using fictional examples where we could manipulate the facts, we found evidence that when people make these judgments before the outcome is known, they are based on the risk of something bad happening, but ev...

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judgments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interaction pattern in people's judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular fa...

Adapting studies typically run in the lab, preschool, or museum to online data collection presents a variety of challenges. The solutions to those challenges depend heavily on the specific questions pursued, the methods used, and the constraints imposed by available technology. We present a partial sample of solutions, discussing approaches we have...

Evaluating others’ actions as praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A seminal study published in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life, considerably earlier than previously thought (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). In this study,...

When laypeople decide if a costly intervention is an overreaction or an appropriate response, they likely base those judgments on mental simulation about what could happen, or what would have happened without an intervention. To narrow down from the infinite set of possibilities they could consider, they may engage in a process of sampling. We exam...

From infancy, humans have the ability to distinguish animate agents from inert objects, and preschoolers map biological and mechanical insides to their appropriate kinds. However, less is known about how identifying something as an animate agent shapes specific inferences about its internal properties. Here, we test whether preschool children (N =...

Young children often struggle to answer the question “what would have happened?” particularly in cases where the adult-like “correct” answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have trouble considering what...

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have trouble considering what...

Infancy researchers have often drawn rich conclusions about early capacities to understand abstract concepts like "causality" or "prosociality" from infants' responses to highly simplified and artificial stimuli, leading to questions about the validity of studies utilizing these methods. Indeed, do these stimuli effectively illustrate abstract conc...

Imagine you see a video of someone pulling back their leg to kick a soccer ball, and then a soccer ball soaring toward a goal. You would likely infer that these scenes are two parts of the same event, and this inference would likely cause you to remember having seen the moment the person kicked the soccer ball, even if that information was never ac...

We can perceive not only low-level features of events such as color and motion, but also seemingly higher-level properties such as causality. A prototypical example of causal perception is the ‘launching effect’: one object (A) moves toward a stationary second object (B) until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the sam...

The field of infancy research faces a difficult challenge: some questions require samples that are simply too large for any one lab to recruit and test. ManyBabies aims to address this problem by forming large-scale collaborations on key theoretical questions in developmental science, while promoting the uptake of Open Science practices. Here, we l...

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...

Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms (e.g., immoral events) and statistical norms (e.g., improbable events). There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects are best explained in a unified way through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or whether these two effects a...

The field of infancy research faces a difficult challenge: some questions require samples that are simply too large for any one lab to recruit and test. ManyBabies aims to address this problem by forming large-scale collaborations on key theoretical questions in developmental science, while promoting the uptake of Open Science practices. Here, we l...

Infant looking-time paradigms often use specialized software for real time manual coding of infant gaze. Here, I introduce PyHab, the first open-source looking-time coding and stimulus presentation solution designed specifically with open science in mind. PyHab is built on the libraries of PsychoPy (Peirce, 2007). PyHab has its own graphical interf...

This repository contains the supporting materials for the manuscript: Jonathan Kominsky & Jonathan Phillips, (submitted). Immoral professors and malfunctioning tools: Counterfactual relevance accounts explain the effect of norm violations on causal selection.

When object A moves adjacent to a stationary object, B, and in that instant A stops moving and B starts moving, people irresistibly see this as an event in which A causes B to move. Real-world causal collisions are subject to Newtonian constraints on the relative speed of B following the collision, but here we show that perceptual constraints on th...

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on "mechanism me...

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools,...

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools,...

Causal judgments are well-known to be sensitive to violations of moral and statistical norms. There is ongoing discussion as to whether these effects are both best explained through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or if moral norm violations should be independently explained through a potential polysemy of the term ‘cause’...

We can perceive not only low-level features of events such as color and motion, but also seemingly higher-level properties such as causality. Perhaps the best example of causal perception is the 'launching effect': one object (A) moves toward a stationary second object (B) until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the s...

For cases in which precise information is practically or actually unknowable, certainty and precision can indicate a lack of competence, while expressions of ignorance may indicate greater expertise. In two experiments, we investigated whether children and adults are able to use this " virtuous ignorance " as a cue to expertise. Experiment 1 found...

Across 3 experiments, we found evidence that information about who owns an artifact influenced 5- to 10-year-old children's and adults' judgments about that artifact's primary function. Children's and adults' use of ownership information was underpinned by their inference that owners are typically familiar with owned artifacts and are therefore lik...

New essays by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists that present recent findings and theoretical developments in the study of concepts. The study of concepts has advanced dramatically in recent years, with exciting new findings and theoretical developments. Core concepts have been investigated in greater depth and new lines of inquiry have...

One of the most remarkable features of human perception is its ability to represent causation. Here we demonstrate that causal perception is sensitive to certain physical regularities in collision events that result from Newtonian mechanics. Consider two balls, A and B, with A moving towards B at 1 m/s and B at rest. When A is with B, A stops movin...

When agents violate norms, they are typically judged to be more of a cause of resulting outcomes. In this study, we suggest that norm violations also reduce the causality of other agents, a novel phenomenon we refer to as “causal supersession.” We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in three experiments. Experiment...

When demonstrating objects to young children, parents use specialized action features, called “motionese,” which elicit attention and facilitate imitation. We hypothesized that the timing of mothers' infant-directed eye gaze in such interactions may provide systematic cues to the structure of action. We asked 35 mothers to demonstrate a series of t...

In the "digital native" generation, internet search engines are a commonly used source of information. However, adolescents may fail to recognize relevant search results when they are related in discipline to the search topic but lack other cues. Middle school students, high school students, and adults rated simulated search results for relevance t...

People tend to associate the abstract concepts of "good" and "bad" with their fluent and disfluent sides of space, as determined by their natural handedness or by experimental manipulation (Casasanto, 2011). Here we investigated influences of spatial perspective taking on the spatialization of "good" and "bad." In the first experiment, participants...

One of the most counterintuitive effects in perception is postdiction — the ability of the visual system to integrate information from shortly after an event occurs into the perception of that very event. Postdictive effects have been found in many contexts, but their underlying nature remains somewhat mysterious. Here we report several studies cau...

Adults automatically adjust their speech and actions in a way that may facilitate infants’ processing (e.g., Brand, Baldwin, & Ashburn, 2002). This research examined whether mothers’ use of repetition for infants depended on whether the object being demonstrated required a series of actions in sequence in order to reach a salient goal (called an “e...

Structure in Mothers’ Demonstrations to Infants of Objects With and Without a Salient End-Goal.