Julian Jara-Ettinger's research while affiliated with Yale University and other places
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Publications (68)
Theory of Mind enables us to attribute mental states to others. But we not only make inferences about mental states (like what someone believes or wants), but about mental processes (like if someone is distracted or whether they remember something). Here, we present a computational formalization of these kinds of inferences. We propose that inferen...
From early in childhood, humans exhibit sophisticated intuitions about how to share knowledge efficiently in simple controlled studies. Yet, untrained adults often fail to teach effectively in real-world situations. Here, we explored what causes adults to struggle in informal pedagogical exchanges. In Experiment 1, we first showed evidence of this...
Human social interactions require understanding and predict- ing other people’s behavior. A growing body of work has found that these inferences are structured around an assump- tion that agents act rationally and efficiently in space. While powerful, this view treats action understanding in a vacuum, ignoring that much social inference happens in...
Preschoolers are discerning learners, preferring to trust people who are accurate, reliable, and appropriately-informed. Do these preferences reflect mental-state reasoning, where children infer what others know from their behavior, or do they reflect a reliance on simple cues? In Experiment 1 we show that four- and five-year-olds can infer knowled...
How veridical is perception? Rather than representing objects as they actually exist in the world, might perception instead represent objects only in terms of the utility they offer to an observer? Previous work employed evolutionary modeling to show that under certain assumptions, natural selection favors such “strict‐interface” perceptual systems...
Children in industrialized cultures typically succeed on Give-N, a test of counting ability, by age 4. On the other hand, counting appears to be learned much later in the Tsimane’, an indigenous group in the Bolivian Amazon. This study tests three hypotheses for what may cause this difference in timing: (a) Tsimane’ children may be shy in providing...
To distribute resources in a fair way, identifying an appropriate outcome is not enough: We must also find a way to produce it. To solve this problem, young children spontaneously use number words and counting in fairness tasks. We hypothesized that children are also sensitive to other people's use of counting, as it reveals that the distributor wa...
Humans can make remarkable social inferences by watching each other's behavior. In many cases, however, people can also make social inferences about agents whose behavior they cannot see, based only on the physical evidence left behind. We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by a form of mental event reconstruction. Under this account, obs...
Humans often communicate using body movements like winks, waves, and nods. However, it is unclear how we identify when someone’s physical actions are communicative. Given people’s propensity to interpret each other’s behavior as aimed to produce changes in the world, we hypothesize that people expect communicative actions to efficiently reveal that...
We investigate how humans infer the rich internal structure of social collectives from patterns of interactions between agents. We propose a computational model of this process which integrates a domain-general statistical learning mechanism with, domain-specific knowledge about social contexts (i.e.: "intuitive sociologies"). We test our model in...
In the United States, children often generalize the meaning of new words by assuming that objects with the same shape have the same name. We propose that this shape bias is influenced by children's exposure to objects of different categories (artifacts and natural kinds) and language to talk about them. We present a cross-cultural study between Eng...
Much of our thinking focuses on deciding what to do in situations where the space of possible options is often too large to evaluate exhaustively. Previous work has found that people do this by learning the general value of different behaviors, and prioritizing thinking about high-value options in new situations. Is this good action bias always the...
In the US, children often generalize the meaning of new words by assuming that objects with the same shape have the same name. We propose that this shape bias is influenced by children’s exposure to objects of different categories (artifacts and natural kinds), and language to talk about them. We present a cross-cultural study between English speak...
Residents living in neighborhoods marked by concentrated disadvantage (i.e., poverty, joblessness, residential segregation) contend with resource scarcity. Theories indicate that competition for resources from an insufficient pool within the context of concentrated disadvantage may be one factor that promotes social norm violations. A limited body...
A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. Yet, people routinely produce redundant adjectives and their propensity to do so varies cross-linguistically. Here, we propose a computational theory, whereby speakers create referential expressions designed to facilitate listeners' refer...
The ability to reason about ignorance is an important and often overlooked representational capacity. Phillips and colleagues assume that knowledge representations are inevitably accompanied by ignorance representations. We argue that this is not necessarily the case, as agents who can reason about knowledge often fail on ignorance tasks, suggestin...
In contrast to object recognition models, humans do not blindly trust their perception when building representations of the world, instead recruiting metacognition to detect percepts that are unreliable or false, such as when we realize that we mistook one object for another. We propose METAGEN, an unsupervised model that enhances object recognitio...
When children learn to count, do they understand its logic independent of the number list that they learned to count with? Here we tested CP-knowers' (ages three to five) understanding of how counting reveals a set's cardinality, even when non-numerical lists are used to count. Participants watched an agent count unobservable objects in two boxes a...
For a gesture to be successful, observers must recognize its communicative purpose. Are communicators sensitive to this problem and do they try to ease their observer’s inferential burden? We propose that people shape their gestures to help observers easily infer that their movements are meant to communicate. Using computational models of recursive...
To distribute resources in a fair way, identifying an appropriate outcome is not enough: We must also find a way to produce it. To solve this problem, young children spontaneously use number words and counting in fairness tasks. We hypothesized that children are also sensitive to other people’s use of counting, as it reveals that the distributor wa...
Human Theory of Mind enables us to attribute mental states like beliefs and desires based on how other people act. However, in many social interactions (particularly ones that lack observable action), people also directly think about other people's thinking. Here we present a computational framework, Bayesian inverse reasoning, for thinking about o...
We propose a computational model of social preference judgments that accounts for the degree of an agents’ uncertainty about the preferences of others. Underlying this model is the principle that, in the face of social uncertainty, people interpret social agents’ behavior under an assumption of expected utility maximization. We evaluate our model i...
Inferences about other people's knowledge and beliefs are central to social interaction. In many situations, however, it's not possible to be sure what other people know because their behavior is consistent with a range of potential epistemic states. Nonetheless, this behavior can give us coarse intuitions about how much someone might know, even if...
To infer what others know, we must consider under what epistemic states their actions were both rational and probable. We test whether preschoolers can compare the probability of different actions (and outcomes) under different epistemic states—and use this to evaluate what others know. Specifically, four- to six-year-olds (n=90) were asked to help...
Human Theory of Mind is typically associated with the ability to infer mental states from observed behavior. In many cases, however, people can also infer the mental states of agents whose behavior they cannot see, based on the physical evidence left behind. We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by a form of mental event reconstruction. U...
When deciding whether to explore, agents must consider both their need for information and its cost. Do children recognize that exploration reflects a trade-off between action costs and expected information gain, inferring epistemic states accordingly? In two experiments, 4- and 5-year-olds (N=144; of diverse race and ethnicity) judge that an agent...
When deciding whether to explore, agents must consider both their need for information and its cost. Do children recognize that exploration reflects a trade‐off between action costs and expected information gain, inferring epistemic states accordingly? In two experiments, 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds (N = 144; of diverse race and ethnicity) judge that an age...
The human ability to reason about the causes behind other people’ behavior is critical for navigating the social world. Recent empirical research with both children and adults suggests that this ability is structured around an assumption that other agents act to maximize some notion of subjective utility. In this paper, we present a formal theory o...
Beyond representing the external world, humans also represent their own cognitive processes. In the context of perception, this metacognition helps us identify unreliable percepts, such as when we recognize that we are seeing an illusion. Here we propose MetaGen, a model for the unsupervised learning of metacognition. In MetaGen, metacognition is e...
A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. In referential communication, the pressure to be efficient is typically formalized as an egocentric bias where speakers aim to minimize production costs. While intuitive, this view has failed to explain why people routinely produce redund...
From minimal observable action, humans make fast, intuitive judgments about what other people think, want, and feel (Heider & Simmel, 1944). Even when no agent is visible, children can infer the presence of intentional agents based on the environmental traces that only agents could leave behind (Saxe et al., 2005; Newman et al., 2010). Here we show...
Beyond words and gestures, people have a remarkable capacity to also communicate through objects: A hat on a chair means it is occupied, rope hanging across an entrance means we should not cross, and objects placed in a closed box means they are not ours to take. How do people generate and interpret the social meaning of objects? We propose that th...
We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers...
Pragmatic theories and computational models of reference must account for people’s frequent
use of redundant color adjectives (e.g., referring to a single triangle as ‘the blue triangle’). The
standard pragmatic view holds that the informativity of a referential expression depends on
pragmatic contrast: color adjectives should be used to contrast c...
When children master counting, do they also understand the logic of how this procedure reveals a set’s cardinality? Here we test children’s understanding of how the correct application of counting principles reveal’s a set’s cardinality, even when non-numerical lists are used to count. Participants watched an agent count unobservable objects in two...
To correctly interpret a message, people must attend to the context in which it was produced. Here we investigate how this process, known as pragmatic reasoning, is guided by two universal forces in human communication: incrementality and efficiency, with speakers of all languages interpreting language incrementally and making the most efficient us...
A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers ought to say as much as necessary, but no more. How speakers determine what is necessary in a given context, however, is unclear. In studies of referential communication, this expectation is often formalized as the idea that speakers should construct reference by selecting the shorte...
Direct instruction facilitates learning without the costs of exploration, yet teachers must be selective because not everything can nor needs to be taught. How do we decide what to teach and what to leave for learners to discover? Here we investigate the cognitive underpinnings of the human ability to prioritize what to teach. We present a computat...
The human ability to reason about the causes behind other people’ behavior is critical for navigating the social world. Recent empirical research with both children and adults suggests that this ability is structured around an assumption that other agents act to maximize some notion of subjective utility. In this paper, we present a formal theory o...
Languages vary in their number of color terms. A widely accepted theory proposes that languages evolve, acquiring color terms in a stereotyped sequence. This theory, by Berlin and Kay (BK), is supported by analyzing best exemplars ("focal colors") of basic color terms in the World Color Survey (WCS) of 110 languages. But the instructions of the WCS...
We review the idea that Theory of Mind—our ability to reason about other people's mental states—can be formalized as inverse reinforcement learning. Under this framework, expectations about how mental states produce behavior are captured in a reinforcement learning (RL) model. Predicting other people’s actions is achieved by simulating a RL model w...
When solving problems, like making predictions or choices, people often "sample" possibilities into mind. Here, we consider whether there is structure to the kinds of thoughts people sample by default-that is, without an explicit goal. Across three experiments we found that what comes to mind by default are samples from a probability distribution t...
When solving problems, like making predictions or choices, people often “sample” possibilities into mind. Here, we consider whether there is structure to the kinds of thoughts people sample by default—that is, without an explicit goal. Across three experiments we found that what comes to mind by default are samples from a probability distribution t...
People sometimes derive contrastive inferences from adjective-modified noun phrases. For example, the description ‘the short pencil’ would normally be understood to contrast a shorter and a longer pencil. In a series of eye-tracking studies, Sedivy (2003, 2004) found that scalar and material adjectives elicited contrastive inferences, but color adj...
Four experiments show that 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds (total N = 112) can identify the referent of underdetermined utterances through their Naïve Utility Calculus—an intuitive theory of people’s behavior structured around an assumption that agents maximize utilities. In Experiments 1–2, a puppet asked for help without specifying to whom she was talking (“C...
Color adjectives are normally used to distinguish entities of the same category (e.g., two triangles of different colors), but they are also used redundantly (to refer to a single triangle). We propose that these two adjective uses exploit two types of color contrast: within-category and across-category. We tested this account in two eye-tracking e...
Humans learn from their own experience, but they also learn a great deal from others. Direct instruction facilitates learning without the costs of exploration, yet teachers must be selective because not everything can nor needs to be taught. How do we decide what to teach, and what to leave for learners to discover? By combining developmental exper...
Humans can seamlessly infer other people's preferences, based on what they do. Broadly, two types of accounts have been proposed to explain different aspects of this ability. The first account focuses on spatial information: Agents' efficient navigation in space reveals what they like. The second account focuses on statistical information: Uncommon...
Piazza et al. reported a strong correlation between education and approximate number sense (ANS) acuity in a remote Amazonian population, suggesting that symbolic and nonsymbolic numerical thinking mutually enhance one another over in mathematics instruction. But Piazza et al. ran their task using a computer display, which may have exaggerated the...
Significance
The number of color terms varies drastically across languages. Yet despite these differences, certain terms (e.g., red) are prevalent, which has been attributed to perceptual salience. This work provides evidence for an alternative hypothesis: The use of color terms depends on communicative needs. Across languages, from the hunter-gath...
A growing set of studies suggests that our ability to infer, and reason about, mental states is supported by the assumption that agents maximize utilities-the rewards they attain minus the costs they incur. This assumption enables observers to work backward from agents' observed behavior to their underlying beliefs, preferences, and competencies. I...
Two-and-a-half-year-olds normally fail standard false-belief tasks. In the classic version, children have to say where a protagonist will look for an apple that, unbeknownst to her, was moved to a new location. Children under 4 generally predict that the protagonist will look for her apple in its current location, rather than where she left it. Set...
Social cognition depends on our capacity for ‘mentalizing’, or explaining an agent’s behaviour in terms of their mental states. The development and neural substrates of mentalizing are well-studied, but its computational basis is only beginning to be probed. Here we present a model of core mentalizing computations: inferring jointly an actor’s beli...
Supplementary Figures, Supplementary Tables, Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References
A capacity for nonverbal numerical estimation is widespread among humans and animals. However, it is currently unclear whether numerical percepts are spontaneously extracted from the environment and whether nonverbal perception is influenced by human exposure to formal mathematics. We tested US adults and children, non-human primates, and numerate...
Languages vary in their number of color terms. Why? The two dominant theories (universalist hypothesis and linguistic-relativity hypothesis), do not account for empirical evidence. Here we test an alternative, the "efficient-communication hypothesis", which postulates that all people with trichromatic vision have similar color perception, but vary...
To master the natural number system, children must understand both the concepts that number words capture and the counting procedure by which they are applied. These two types of knowledge develop in childhood, but their connection is poorly understood. Here we explore the relationship between the mastery of counting and the mastery of exact numeri...
We propose that human social cognition is structured around a basic understanding of ourselves and others as intuitive utility maximizers: from a young age, humans implicitly assume that agents choose goals and actions to maximize the rewards they expect to obtain relative to the costs they expect to incur. This 'naïve utility calculus' allows both...
Cooperation often results in a final material resource that must be shared, but deciding how to distribute that resource is not straightforward. A distribution could count as fair if all members receive an equal reward (egalitarian distributions), or if each member's reward is proportional to their merit (merit-based distributions). Here, we propos...
Adults' social evaluations are influenced by their perception of other people's competence and motivation: Helping when it is difficult to help is praiseworthy, and not helping when it is easy to help is reprehensible. Here, we look at whether children's social evaluations are affected by the costs that agents incur. We found that toddlers can use...
Humans explain and predict other agents' behavior using mental state concepts, such as beliefs and desires. Computational and developmental evidence suggest that such inferences are enabled by a principle of rational action: the expectation that agents act efficiently, within situational constraints, to achieve their goals. Here we propose that the...
Many social judgments hinge on assigning responsibility to individuals for their role in a group's success or failure. Often the group's success depends on every team member acting in a rational way. When someone does not conform to what others expect of them, cooperation breaks down. We present a computational model of responsibility judgments for...
We show that children in the Tsimane', a farming-foraging group in the Bolivian rain-forest, learn number words along a similar developmental trajectory to children from industrialized countries. Tsimane' children successively acquire the first three or four number words before fully learning how counting works. However, their learning is substanti...
Observing the actions of other people allows us to learn not only about their mental states, but also about hidden aspects of a shared environmental situation – things we cannot see, but they can, and that influence their behavior in predictable ways. This paper presents a computational model of how peo-ple can learn about the world through these s...
Citations
... This question has kept scientists and philosophers busy for centuries and led to heated debates across various fields and domains including neuroscience, psychology, economics and evolutionary biology 8 . Some views support the idea that organisms should represent objects as they exist in the world, as closely as biological limitations allow 9,10 . Others posit that perceptual representations should be in general different from the actual physical world, and these representations should directly map onto the utility they offer to the agents 11-13 . ...
... Many valuable behaviors (social norms and rituals, steps necessary for effective tool use, safety procedures, etc.) are cognitively opaque (see e.g., Kenward et al., 2011;Keupp et al., 2013Keupp et al., , 2018Rakoczy et al., 2008) and researchers have suggested that children's tendency to imitate even seemingly unnecessary, inefficient actions may be critical for transmitting both instrumental skills and social conventions (Horner & Whiten, 2005;Keupp et al., 2018;Legare & Nielsen, 2015;Lyons et al., 2007;Nielsen, Moore, & Mohamedally, 2012;Over & Carpenter, 2013;see Hoehl et al., 2019 for review). Seemingly inefficient actions can also indicate that the actor's goal was simply to perform the movements for their own sake, such as in dance (Schachner & Carey, 2013) or were intended as communicative gestures (Royka et al., 2022), instead of reaching for or manipulating other objects. ...
... Studies have shown, however, that all other factors being equal-i.e., not taking into account differences in effort, ability, or deservingness-people typically default to equality as a preferred allocation norm (Barber & Simmering, 2002; for a recent country-comparative analysis, see Van Hootegem, 2022). This assumption is supported by research in schoolchildren, among whom an egalitarian motivation is found in those as young as 7 years old-for instance, when they are instructed to distribute candy amongst themselves (Feng et al., 2013;Jacobs et al., 2022). Translating such findings to the organizational context we can assume that on average, most people will find inclusive talent management fairer than exclusive talent management. ...
... These biases seem to take hold early in life: for instance, shape has been postulated to be a critical semantic dimension readily available to all humans starting from as early as 2 years of age [47]. However, during language learning, both vocabulary and language structure influence attention to shape, such that the well-established English 'shape-bias' may not arise in other languages, such as Tsimane (Bolivia) [48]. Crucially, these differences between English and other languages cannot simply be reduced to passive exposure to different shape statistics, as supported by the fact that English children with hearing loss display a reduced shape bias compared with their hearing counterparts, even after controlling for vocabulary size [49]. ...
... This is an important observation that places the PFL hypothesis at the level of pragmatics, not grammar -although this hypothesis is both constrained and supported by grammar (see Barth et al., 2021). In this view, the acquisition and regular use of reference systems trains CSC through pragmatic reasoning: speakers must select referential expressions that enable their recipients to identify the intended referent (a process known as audience design), while listeners must reason about the speaker's referential intention when interpreting these expressions (Grice, 1975;Frank & Goodman, 2012;Jara-Ettinger & Rubio-Fernandez, 2021a, 2021b. Therefore, empirically testing the PFL hypothesis (or making progress in our understanding of cultural evolutionary pragmatics, more generally) would require the expertise and collaboration not only of researchers in linguistics, typology and social cognition, but also in experimental pragmatics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and cognitive science and neuroscience. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/278787439775752-1443479513672_Q64/Paula-Rubio-Fernandez-2.jpg)
... Importantly, scarcity mindsets can also induce social problems. For instance, in such a mindset, people might loosen their moral standards (Sharma et al., 2014) or tend to violate social norms (Chang et al., 2022). The incidence of antisocial behavior has also been reported to increase with the degree to which people perceive a scarcity of resources (Prediger et al., 2014). ...
... Finally, many theorists offer functional arguments for the veridicality of perception. 1 For instance, Palmer writes: "Evolutionarily speaking, visual perception is useful only if it is reasonably accurate " (1999: 6). Against this, Hoffman et al. (2015) make the striking claim that perception's goal -guiding adaptive behaviour -supports an opposing view on which our percepts are wholly non-veridical, deliberately hiding objective reality and instead offering an easily engageable interface (for criticism, see Berke et al., 2021). ...
... To demonstrate the fragility of understanding the counting process by preschool children who know the Сardinal principle C. Jacobs et al. [16] conducted a series of experiments. The experimenter used non-numeric lists to count unobservable objects in two boxes. ...
... Recent work has found evidence for a phenomenon termed social mindfulness: Children positively evaluate those who leave multiple options for others when the other persons' preference is unknown (Zhao et al., 2021; for similar work with adults, see Davis, Carlson, Dunham, & Jara-Ettinger, 2021;Van Doesum, Van Lange, & Van Lange, 2013). In this other work, characters choose one of two types of resources; however, those who choose first do not know which option a last character wants. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/887513598144512-1588611139950_Q64/Ryan-Carlson.jpg)
... Such findings about exploratory play are broadly consistent with work on children's early understanding of principles of rational action. Even infants expect agents to act efficiently to achieve their goals (e.g., Csibra et al., 2003;Gergely et al., 1995;Mascaro & Csibra, 2022;Varga et al., 2021), and toddlers and preschoolers engage in rational planning, weighing the cost of acting against its value (Bridgers et al., 2020;Liu et al., 2019;Sommerville et al., 2018) and assuming others will do the same (Aboody et al., 2021;Jara-Ettinger et al., 2015, 2017. ...
