Mechanistic complexity is fundamental: Evidence from judgments, attention, and memory.

What makes an object ? Complexity comes in many different forms. Some objects are complex but simple (e.g.

Adults' learning of complex explanations violates their intuitions about optimal explanatory order.

Should you first teach about the purpose of a microwave or about how it heats food? Adults strongly prefer explanations to present function before mechanism and information about a whole to precede information about its component parts. Here we replicate those preferences (Study 1). Using the same stimuli, we then ask whether those pedagogical preferences reflect ease of learning of labels, function, or mechanism.

Same people, different group: Social structures are a central component of group concepts.

We examine whether people conceptualize organized groups as having at least two parts: In addition to members (e.g., Alice), they also have social structures (i.

Young children can infer information preferences from goals and recommend appropriate sources to others.

As adults, we intuitively understand how others' goals influence their information-seeking preferences. For example, you might recommend a dense book full of mechanistic details to someone trying to learn about a topic in-depth, but a more lighthearted book filled with surprising stories to someone seeking entertainment. Moreover, you might do this with confidence despite knowing few details about either book.

A right way to explain? Function, mechanism, and the order of explanations.

People generally prefer functional explanations over mechanistic ones. This preference might arise from attributing greater value to functional information. However, instead of an overall preference for functional explanations, people might simply expect functional information to precede mechanistic information.

Subjectivity and social constitution: Contrasting conceptions of institutions, artifacts, and animals.

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., ), artifactual (e.

"I know it's complicated": Children detect relevant information about object complexity.

Mechanistic complexity is an important property that affects how we interact with and learn from artifacts. Although highly complex artifacts have only recently become part of human material culture, they are ever-present in contemporary life. In previous research, children successfully detected complexity contrasts when given information about the functions of simple and complex objects.

Quantity perception: The forest and the trees.

Park (2021) has described "flawed stimulus design(s)" in our recent studies on area perception. Here, we briefly respond to those critiques. While the rigorous, computational approaches taken by Park (and others) certainly have value, we believe that our approach - one that focuses the perceptual reality of quantity rather than the physical reality - is essential.

Says who? Children consider informants' sources when deciding whom to believe.

To successfully navigate the world, we cannot simply accept everything we hear as true. We must think critically about others' testimony, believing only sources who are well-informed and trustworthy. This ability is especially crucial in early childhood, a time when we both learn the most, and have the least prior knowledge we can fall back upon to verify others' claims.

Thinking takes time: Children use agents' response times to infer the source, quality, and complexity of their knowledge.

Limits on mental speed entail speed-accuracy tradeoffs for problem-solving, but memory and perception are accurate on much faster timescales. While response times drive inference across the behavioral sciences, they may also help laypeople interpret each othejognrs' everyday behavior. We examined children's (ages 5 to 10) use of agents' response time to infer the source and quality of their knowledge.

Understanding "Why:" How Implicit Questions Shape Explanation Preferences.

Adults and children 'promiscuously' endorse teleological answers to 'why' questions-a tendency linked to arguments that humans are intuitively theistic and naturally unscientific. But how do people arrive at an endorsement of a teleological answer? Here, we show that the endorsement of teleological answers need not imply unscientific reasoning (n = 880). A series of experiments show that (a) 'why' questions can be understood as a query for one of two distinct kinds of information and (b) these "implicit questions" can explain adults' answer preferences without appeal to unscientific worldviews.

The potential for effective reasoning guides children's preference for small group discussion over crowdsourcing.

Communication between social learners can make a group collectively "wiser" than any individual, but conformist tendencies can also distort collective judgment. We asked whether intuitions about when communication is likely to improve or distort collective judgment could allow social learners to take advantage of the benefits of communication while minimizing the risks. In three experiments (n = 360), 7- to 10-year old children and adults decided whether to refer a question to a small group for discussion or "crowdsource" independent judgments from individual advisors.

Do children estimate area using an "Additive-Area Heuristic"?

A large and growing body of work has documented robust illusions of area perception in adults. To date, however, there has been surprisingly little in-depth investigation into children's area perception, despite the importance of this topic to the study of quantity perception more broadly (and to the many studies that have been devoted to studying children's number perception). Here, in order to understand the interactions of number and area on quantity perception, we study both dimensions in tandem.

No guts, no glory: underestimating the benefits of providing children with mechanistic details.

Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children's ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children? Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure to mechanism benefits children via the formation of abstract causal knowledge that supports epistemic evaluation. We tested 240 6-9 year-olds' memory for concrete details and the ability to distinguish expertise before, immediately after, or a week after viewing a video about how combustion engines work.

Motive on the mind: Explanatory preferences at multiple stages of the legal-investigative process.

Much work has investigated explanatory preferences for things like animals and artifacts, but how do explanation preferences manifest in everyday life? Here, we focus on the criminal justice system as a case study. In this domain, outcomes critically depend on how actors in the system (e.g.

Evidence for multiple sources of inductive potential: Occupations and their relations to social institutions.

Several current theories have essences as primary drivers of inductive potential: e.g., people infer dogs share properties because they share essences.

Win-win denial: The psychological underpinnings of zero-sum thinking.

A core proposition in economics is that voluntary exchanges benefit both parties. We show that people often deny the mutually beneficial nature of exchange, instead espousing the belief that one or both parties fail to benefit from the exchange. Across four studies (and 8 further studies in the online supplementary materials), participants read about simple exchanges of goods and services, judging whether each party to the transaction was better off or worse off afterward.

Using space to remember: Short-term spatial structure spontaneously improves working memory.

Spatial information plays an important role in how we remember. In general, there are two (non mutually exclusive) views regarding the role that space plays in memory. One view is that objects overlapping in space interfere with each other in memory.

How We See Area and Why It Matters.

A large and growing literature examines how we see the visual quantities of number, area, and density. The literature rests on an untested assumption: that our perception of area is veridical. Here, we discuss a systematic distortion of perceived area and its implications for quantity perception more broadly.

A Ubiquitous Illusion of Volume: Are Impressions of 3D Volume Captured by an "Additive Heuristic"?

Several empirical approaches have attempted to explain perception of 2D and 3D size. While these approaches have documented interesting perceptual effects, they fail to offer a compelling, general explanation of everyday size perception. Here, we offer one.

The Shape of Space: Evidence for Spontaneous but Flexible Use of Polar Coordinates in Visuospatial Representations.

What is the format of spatial representation? In mathematics, we often conceive of two primary ways of representing 2D space, , which capture horizontal and vertical relations, and , which capture angle and distance relations. Do either of these two coordinate systems play a representational role in the human mind? Six experiments, using a simple visual-matching paradigm, show that (a) representational format is recoverable from the errors that observers make in simple spatial tasks, (b) human-made errors spontaneously favor a polar coordinate system of representation, and (c) observers are capable of using other coordinate systems when acting in highly structured spaces (e.g.

The trajectory of counterfactual simulation in development.

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 to change and what to keep fixed when comparing counterfactual alternatives to reality.

An Illusion of Self-Sufficiency for Learning About Artifacts in Scaffolded Learners, But Not Observers.

Two studies ask whether scaffolded children (n = 243, 5-6 years and 9-10 years) recognize that assistance is needed to learn to use complex artifacts. In Study 1, children were asked to learn to use a toy pantograph. While children recognized the need for assistance for indirect knowledge, 70% of scaffolded children claimed that they would have learned to use the artifact without assistance, even though 0% of children actually succeeded without assistance.

Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representations.

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 actually presented (Strickland & Keil, 2011, Cognition, 121[3], 409-415). What cues trigger people to "fill in" causal events from incomplete information? Is it due to the experience they have had with soccer balls being kicked toward goals? Is it the visual similarity of the object in both halves of the video? Or is it the mere spatiotemporal continuity of the event? In three experiments, we tested these different potential mechanisms underlying the "filling-in" effect.

Judgments of spatial extent are fundamentally illusory: 'Additive-area' provides the best explanation.

How do we represent extent in our spatial world? Recent work has shown that even the simplest spatial judgments - estimates of 2D area - present challenges to our visual system. Indeed, area judgments are best accounted for by 'additive area' (the sum of objects' dimensions) rather than 'true area' (i.e.