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Publications
Publications (255)
In polarized societies, divided subgroups of people have different perspectives on a range of topics. Aiming to reduce polarization, authorities may use debunking to lend support to one perspective over another. Debunking by authorities gives all observers shared information, which could reduce disagreement. In practice, however, debunking may have...
Human infants are born with their eyes open and an otherwise limited motor repertoire; thus, studies measuring infant looking are commonly used to investigate the developmental origins of perception and cognition. However, scholars have long expressed concerns about the reliability and interpretation of looking behaviours. We evaluated these concer...
Children must learn the norms of their society. One source of information is observing parents, teachers and other authorities to see which behaviors they punish. We test the hypothesis that young children selectively learn that punished actions are wrong, only when they deem the punisher to be legitimate. Across three pre-registered studies, 6- to...
Almost all of human infants’ experience and learning takes place in the context of caregiving relationships. This paper considers how infants understand the care they receive. We begin by outlining plausible features of an “intuitive theory” of care. On this intuitive theory, caregiving has both a distinctive foundational structure and distinctive...
Do toddlers and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests they do. But a growing body of failed replication studies raised questions about the paradigm’s suitability, urging the need to test the robustness of AL as a spontaneous measure of ToM. In a multi-lab collaboration we examine...
In polarized societies, divided subgroups of people have different perspectives on a range of topics. Aiming to reduce polarization, authorities may use debunking to lend support to one perspective over another. Debunking by authorities gives all observers shared information, which could reduce disagreement. In practice, however, debunking may have...
How do we decide what to look at and when to stop looking? Even very young infants engage in active visual selection, looking less and less as stimuli are repeated (habituation) and regaining interest when novel stimuli are subsequently introduced (dishabituation). The mechanisms underlying these looking time changes remain uncertain, however, due...
The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate an asynchronous workflow for conducting violation-of-expectation (VoE) experiments, which is fully “hands-off” for the expe...
In human adults, multiple cortical regions respond robustly to faces, including the occipital face area (OFA) and fusiform face area (FFA), implicated in face perception, and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), implicated in higher-level social functions. When in development, does face selectivity arise in each o...
Left hemisphere damage in adulthood often leads to linguistic deficits, but many cases of early damage leave linguistic processing preserved, and a functional language system can develop in the right hemisphere. To explain this early apparent equipotentiality of the two hemispheres for language, some have proposed that the language system is bilate...
How do humans decide what to look at and when to stop looking? The Rational Action, Noisy Choice for Habituation (RANCH) model formulates looking behaviors as a rational information acquisition process. RANCH instantiates a hypothesis about the perceptual encoding process using a neural network-derived embedding space, which allows it to operate on...
Humans effortlessly use vision to plan and guide navigation through the local environment, or “scene”. A network of three cortical regions responds selectively to visual scene information, including the occipital (OPA), parahippocampal (PPA), and medial place areas (MPA) – but how this network supports visually-guided navigation is unclear. Recent...
The study of infant gaze has long been a key tool for understanding the developing mind. However, labor-intensive data collection and processing limit the speed at which this understanding can be advanced. Here, we demonstrate a fully asynchronous, automated workflow for conducting Violation-of-Expectation (VoE) experiments. We first replicate four...
After seeing one solid object apparently passing through another, or a person taking the long route to a destination when a shortcut was available, human adults classify those events as surprising. When tested on these events in violation-of-expectation (VOE) experiments, infants look longer at the same outcomes, relative to similar but expected ou...
Theory of mind (ToM) reasoning refers to the process by which we reason about the mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions) of others. Here, we describe an open dataset of responses from children who completed a story booklet task for assessing ToM reasoning (n = 321 3–12-year-old children, including 64 (neurotypical) children assessed longitudina...
The current studies investigated children's expectations regarding caregiving relationships, specifically whether children expect asymmetrical obligations between parents and children. In Study 1, we asked whether children, ages 5 to 7 years old, would anticipate that parents would preferentially share with their children over other known children...
Much of the language we encounter in our everyday lives comes in the form of conversation, yet the majority of research on the neural basis of language comprehension has used input from only one speaker at a time. 20 adults were scanned while passively observing audiovisual conversations using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In a block-desig...
Infants look longer at events that are unexpected (e.g. a ball floating in midair) and at events that are different from what they have previously seen (e.g. rightward motion, after repeated exposure to leftward motion). This has led to debate about whether shared or distinct mechanisms lead infants to look longer toward unexpected events (the viol...
Theory of mind (ToM) reasoning refers to the process by which we reason about the mental states (beliefs, desires, emotions) of others. Here, we describe an open dataset of responses from children who completed a story booklet task for assessing ToM reasoning (n=321 3–12-year-old children, including 64 (neurotypical) children assessed longitudinall...
People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime. It is not clear why it makes sense for them to do so, given that apprehension and punishment may make their situation even worse. Recent theory suggests that people should be more willing to steal if they are on the wrong side of a ‘desperation threshold’; that is, a l...
From sparse descriptions of events, observers can make systematic and nuanced predictions of what emotions the people involved will experience. We propose a formal model of emotion prediction in the context of a public high-stakes social dilemma. This model uses inverse planning to infer a person’s beliefs and preferences, including social preferen...
Punishment is a cost imposed on a target, in response to an undesirable 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 unfamiliar societies, we experimentally man...
From birth, humans make decisions about what to look at and for how long. A classic framework proposes encoding as a key driver of looking behavior in development - in early stages of encoding, infants and young children prefer to engage with familiar stimuli, while at later stages of encoding they prefer novel stimuli. Though this framework is oft...
Prior studies have observed selective neural responses in the adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower‐level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect f...
Prior studies have observed selective neural responses in adult human auditory cortex to music and speech that cannot be explained by the differing lower-level acoustic properties of these stimuli. Does infant cortex exhibit similarly selective responses to music and speech shortly after birth? To answer this question, we attempted to collect funct...
Response to: Blumberg, M. S., & Adolph, K. E. (2023). Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.12.014
Recent neuroimaging evidence challenges the classical view that face identity and facial expression are processed by segregated neural pathways, showing that information about identity and expression are encoded within common brain regions. This article tests the hypothesis that integrated representations of identity and expression arise spontaneou...
When adults see one solid object pass through another, or see a person take the long route to a destination when a shortcut was available, we classify those events as surprising. Infants look infants look longer at the same unexpected outcomes, compared with visually similar but expected outcomes, in violation-of-expectation (VOE) experiments. What...
Much of the language we encounter in our everyday lives comes in the form of conversation, yet the majority of research on the neural basis of language comprehension has used language input from a single source. To determine whether canonical left-hemisphere language regions are sensitive to features of dialogue beyond the comprehensibility of the...
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 decisi...
People facing material deprivation are more likely to turn to acquisitive crime. It is not clear why it makes sense for them to do so, given that apprehension and punishment may make their situation even worse. A recent theoretical model explored the consequences of positing a desperation threshold, a critical level of resources below which it is d...
How do people perceive and pursue legitimate power? For the social sciences, this question is venerable. Yet, for cognitive science, it offers fresh and generative opportunities to explore how adults evaluate legitimacy, how children learn to do so, and what difference legitimate power makes for people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Infants are born into networks of individuals who are socially connected. How do infants begin learning which individuals are their own potential social partners? Using digitally edited videos, we showed 12-mo-old infants’ social interactions between unknown individuals and their own parents. In studies 1 to 4, after their parent showed affiliation...
Infants are born into networks of individuals who are socially connected. How do infants begin learning which individuals are their own potential social partners? Using digitally edited videos, we showed 12-mo-old infants’ social interactions between unknown individuals and their own parents. In studies 1 to 4, after their parent showed affiliation...
Group representations based on recursive utilities can be used to derive the same predictions as Pietraszewski in conflict situations. Additionally, these representations generalize to non-conflict situations, asymmetric relationships, and represent the stakes in a conflict. However, both proposals fail to represent asymmetries of power and respons...
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 decision...
Scanning young children while they watch short, engaging, commercially-produced movies has emerged as a promising approach for increasing data retention and quality. Movie stimuli also evoke a richer variety of cognitive processes than traditional experiments, allowing the study of multiple aspects of brain development simultaneously. However, beca...
Across human societies, people form "thick" relationships characterized by strong attachments, obligations, and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships share food utensils, kiss, or engage in other distinctive interactions that involve sharing saliva. We found that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share saliva (as o...
Across human societies, people form ‘thick’ relationships, characterized by strong attachments, obligations and mutual responsiveness. People in thick relationships engage in distinctive interactions, like sharing food utensils or kissing, that involve sharing saliva. Here we show that children, toddlers, and infants infer that dyads who share sali...
In human adults, multiple cortical regions respond robustly to faces, including the occipital face area (OFA) and fusiform face area (FFA), implicated in face perception, and the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), implicated in higher level social functions. When in development does face selectivity arise in each of...
Scanning young children while watching short, engaging, commercially-produced movies has emerged as a promising approach for increasing data retention and quality. Movie stimuli also evoke a richer variety of cognitive processes than traditional experiments - allowing the study of multiple aspects of brain development simultaneously. However, becau...
Three of the most robust functional landmarks in the human brain are the selective responses to faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), scenes in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and bodies in the extrastriate body area (EBA). Are the selective responses of these regions present early in development or do they require many years to develop? Pri...
Humans employ a richly structured intuitive theory of psychology to reason about others’ unobserved mental states, a faculty called “Theory of Mind”. Advances in behavioral modeling have begun to capture aspects of the flexible and nuanced reasoning people exhibit when inferring the contents of others’ minds. In parallel, advances in neuroimaging h...
Purpose
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during infancy poses challenges due to practical, methodological, and analytical considerations. The aim of this study was to implement a hardware‐related approach to increase subject compliance for fMRI involving awake infants. To accomplish this, we designed, constructed, and evaluated an adapt...
Three of the most robust functional landmarks in the human brain are the selective responses to faces in the fusiform face area (FFA), scenes in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), and bodies in the extrastriate body area (EBA). Are the selective responses of these regions present early in development, or do they require many years to develop? Pr...
Do children and adults engage in spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM)? Accumulating evidence from anticipatory looking (AL) studies suggests that they do. But a growing body of studies failed to replicate these original findings. This paper presents the first step of a large-scale multi-lab collaboration dedicated to testing the robustness of spontaneo...
Human social behaviour crucially depends on our ability to reason about others. This capacity for theory of mind has a vital role in social cognition because it enables us not only to form a detailed understanding of the hidden thoughts and beliefs of other individuals but also to understand that they may differ from our own1–3. Although a number o...
When people are forced to be isolated from each other, do they crave social interactions? To address this question, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural responses evoked by food and social cues after participants (n = 40) experienced 10 h of mandated fasting or total social isolation. After isolation, people felt lonely a...
People have preferences for how their social environment is organized and governed. One influential explanation of variation in these preferences focuses on individual differences in sensitivity to threats. Recent research demonstrates that this relationship is a function not only of the degree of sensitivity (greater or lesser), but also of the da...
Facial and vocal cues provide critical social information about other humans, including their emotional and attentional states and the content of their speech. Recent work has shown that the face-responsive region of posterior superior temporal sulcus (“fSTS”) also responds strongly to vocal sounds. Here, we investigate the functional role of this...
Language provides a rich source of information about other people’s thoughts and feelings. Consequently, delayed access to language may influence conceptual development in Theory of Mind (ToM). We use functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioral tasks to study ToM development in child (n = 33, 4–12 years old) and adult (n = 36) fluent signe...
Theory of Mind (ToM)—the intuitive theory by which people understand others’ actions in terms of their beliefs, desires, and emotions—undergoes dramatic change in childhood. Among adults, utilizing this intuitive theory recruits a specific network of brain regions, including the temporoparietal junction. In this chapter, we summarize recent neuroim...
Adults and children recruit a specific network of brain regions when engaged in "Theory of Mind" (ToM) reasoning. Recently, fMRI studies of adults have used multivariate analyses to provide a deeper characterization of responses in these regions. These analyses characterize representational distinctions within the social domain, rather than compari...
Adults and children recruit a specific network of brain regions when engaged in “Theory of Mind” (ToM) reasoning. Recently, fMRI studies of adults have used multivariate analyses to provide a deeper characterization of responses in these regions. These analyses characterize representational distinctions within the social domain, rather than compari...
Observers attribute emotions to others relying on multiple cues, including facial expressions and information about the situation. Recent research has used Bayesian models to study how these cues are integrated. Existing studies have used a variety of tasks to probe emotion inferences, but limited attention has been devoted to the possibility that...
Noise is a major challenge for the analysis of fMRI data in general and for connectivity analyses in particular. As researchers develop increasingly sophisticated tools to model statistical dependence between the fMRI signal in different brain regions, there is a risk that these models may increasingly capture artifactual relationships between regi...
When we watch movies, we consider the characters’ mental states in order to understand and predict the narrative. Recent work in fMRI uses movie‐viewing paradigms to measure functional responses in brain regions recruited for such mental state reasoning (the Theory of Mind (“ToM”) network). Here, two groups of young children (n=30 3‐4yo, n=26 6‐7yo...
According to the dominant account of face processing, recognition of emotional expressions is implemented by the superior temporal sulcus (STS), while recognition of face identity is implemented by inferior temporal cortex (IT) (Haxby et al., 2000). However, recent patient and imaging studies (Fox et al., 2011, Anzellotti et al. 2017) found that th...
Many studies have investigated the development of face-, scene-, and body-selective regions in the ventral visual pathway. This work has primarily focused on comparing the size and univariate selectivity of these neural regions in children versus adults. In contrast, very few studies have investigated the developmental trajectory of more distribute...
Language abilities are clearly related to performance on theory of mind (ToM) tasks in childhood, but the role of language in ToM development continues to be debated. Deaf children who use sign language offer unique insights into this debate, because children who are d/Deaf and born to hearing parents often experience delayed exposure to language....
Facial motion is a primary source of social information about other humans. Prior fMRI studies have identified regions of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) that respond specifically to perceived face movements (termed fSTS), but little is known about the nature of motion representations in these regions. Here we use fMRI and multivoxel pattern ana...
Noise is a major challenge for the analysis of fMRI data in general and for connectivity analyses in particular. As researchers develop increasingly sophisticated tools to model statistical dependence between the fMRI signal in different brain regions, there is a risk that these models may increasingly capture artifactual relationships between regi...
Language abilities are clearly related to performance on theory of mind (ToM) tasks in childhood, but the role of language in ToM development continues to be debated. Deaf children who use sign language offer unique insights into this debate, because children who are d/Deaf and born to hearing parents often experience delayed exposure to language....
Emotional expressions are typically transient; while we may react emotionally to a new event, we are unlikely to respond with the same emotion once the event becomes familiar. Here we look at whether toddlers understand the relationship between people's epistemic states and their emotional responses. Younger (12-17-month) and older (18-24-month) to...
Recently acquired fMRI data from human and macaque infants provide novel insights into the origins of cortical networks specialized for perceiving faces. Data from both species converge: cortical regions responding preferentially to faces are present and spatially organized early in infancy, although fully selective face areas emerge much later. Wh...
