Children's exploratory play tracks the discriminability of hypotheses.

Effective curiosity-driven learning requires recognizing that the value of evidence for testing hypotheses depends on what other hypotheses are under consideration. Do we intuitively represent the discriminability of hypotheses? Here we show children alternative hypotheses for the contents of a box and then shake the box (or allow children to shake it themselves) so they can hear the sound of the contents. We find that children are able to compare the evidence they hear with imagined evidence they do not hear but might have heard under alternative hypotheses.

Gesture Helps, Only If You Need It: Inhibiting Gesture Reduces Tip-of-the-Tongue Resolution for Those With Weak Short-Term Memory.

People frequently gesture when a word is on the tip of their tongue (TOT), yet research is mixed as to whether and why gesture aids lexical retrieval. We tested three accounts: the lexical retrieval hypothesis, which predicts that semantically related gestures facilitate successful lexical retrieval; the cognitive load account, which predicts that matching gestures facilitate lexical retrieval only when retrieval is hard, as in the case of a TOT; and the motor movement account, which predicts that any motor movements should support lexical retrieval. In Experiment 1 (a between-subjects study; N = 90), gesture inhibition, but not neck inhibition, affected TOT resolution but not overall lexical retrieval; participants in the gesture-inhibited condition resolved fewer TOTs than participants who were allowed to gesture.

Reduced neural selectivity for mental states in deaf children with delayed exposure to sign language.

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 signers of American Sign Language (ASL), and characterize neural ToM responses during ASL and movie-viewing tasks.

Changing minds: Children's inferences about third party belief revision.

By the age of 5, children explicitly represent that agents can have both true and false beliefs based on epistemic access to information (e.g., Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001).

Moral alchemy: How love changes norms.

We discuss a process by which non-moral concerns (that is concerns agreed to be non-moral within a particular cultural context) can take on moral content. We refer to this phenomenon as moral alchemy and suggest that it arises because moral obligations of care entail recursively valuing loved ones' values, thus allowing propositions with no moral weight in themselves to become morally charged. Within this framework, we predict that when people believe a loved one cares about a behavior more than they do themselves, the moral imperative to care about the loved one's interests will raise the value of that behavior, such that people will be more likely to infer that third parties will see the behavior as wrong (Experiment 1) and the behavior itself as more morally important (Experiment 2) than when the same behaviors are considered outside the context of a caring relationship.

"I use it when I see it": The role of development and experience in Deaf and hearing children's understanding of iconic gesture.

Iconicity is prevalent in gesture and in sign languages, yet the degree to which children recognize and leverage iconicity for early language learning is unclear. In Experiment 1 of the current study, we presented sign-naïve 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds (n=87) with iconic shape gestures and no additional scaffolding to ask whether children can spontaneously map iconic gestures to their referents. Four- and five-year-olds, but not three-year-olds, recognized the referents of iconic shape gestures above chance.

Refining intra-protein contact prediction by graph analysis.

Background: Accurate prediction of intra-protein residue contacts from sequence information will allow the prediction of protein structures. Basic predictions of such specific contacts can be further refined by jointly analyzing predicted contacts, and by adding information on the relative positions of contacts in the protein primary sequence.

Results: We introduce a method for graph analysis refinement of intra-protein contacts, termed GARP.