@article {4655, title = {The logic of universalization guides moral judgment}, journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)}, year = {2020}, month = {Feb-10-2020}, pages = {202014505}, abstract = {

To explain why an action is wrong, we sometimes say, {\textquotedblleft}What if everybody did that?{\textquotedblright} In other words, even if a single person{\textquoteright}s behavior is harmless, that behavior may be wrong if it would be harmful once universalized. We formalize the process of universalization in a computational model, test its quantitative predictions in studies of human moral judgment, and distinguish it from alternative models. We show that adults spontaneously make moral judgments consistent with the logic of universalization, and report comparable patterns of judgment in children. We conclude that, alongside other well-characterized mechanisms of moral judgment, such as outcome-based and rule-based thinking, the logic of universalizing holds an important place in our moral minds.

}, issn = {0027-8424}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.2014505117}, url = {http://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014505117}, author = {Levine, Sydney and Max Kleiman-Weiner and Laura Schulz and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Fiery A Cushman} } @article {4814, title = {Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access, and Impact}, journal = {Trends in Cognitive Sciences}, volume = {24}, year = {2020}, month = {09/2020}, pages = {675 - 678}, issn = {13646613}, doi = {10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.004}, url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1364661320301455}, author = {Sheskin, Mark and Scott, Kimberly and Mills, Candice M. and Bergelson, Elika and Bonawitz, Elizabeth and Elizabeth S Spelke and Fei-Fei, Li and Keil, Frank C. and Gweon, Hyowon and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Julian Jara-Ettinger and Adolph, Karen E. and Rhodes, Marjorie and Frank, Michael C. and Mehr, Samuel A. and Laura Schulz} } @article {4305, title = {How Adults{\textquoteright} Actions, Outcomes, and Testimony Affect Preschoolers{\textquoteright} Persistence}, journal = {Child Development}, year = {2019}, month = {Sep-09-2019}, abstract = {

Across four experiments, we looked at how 4- and 5-year-olds{\textquoteright} (n\ =\ 520) task persistence was affected by observations of adult actions (high or low effort), outcomes (success or failure), and testimony (setting expectations{\textemdash}{\textquotedblleft}This will be hard,{\textquotedblright} pep talks{\textemdash}{\textquotedblleft}You can do this,{\textquotedblright} value statements{\textemdash}{\textquotedblleft}Trying hard is important,{\textquotedblright} and baseline). Across experiments, outcomes had the biggest impact: preschoolers consistently tried harder after seeing the adult succeed than fail. Additionally, adult effort affected children{\textquoteright}s persistence, but only when the adult succeeded. Finally, children{\textquoteright}s persistence was highest when the adult both succeeded and practiced what she preached: exerting effort while testifying to its value.

}, issn = {0009-3920}, doi = {10.1111/cdev.13305}, url = {https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13305}, author = {Leonard, Julia A. and Garcia, Andrea and Laura Schulz} } @conference {4523, title = {Query-guided visual search }, booktitle = {41st Annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society}, year = {2019}, month = {07/2019}, address = {Montreal, Qu{\'e}bec, Canada}, author = {Junyi Chu and Jon Gauthier and Roger Levy and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @article {3622, title = {Rational inference of beliefs and desires from emotional expressions}, journal = {Cognitive Science}, volume = {42}, year = {2018}, month = {04/2018}, chapter = {850-884}, abstract = {

We investigated people{\textquoteright}s ability to infer others{\textquoteright} mental states from their emotional reactions, manipulating whether agents wanted, expected, and caused an outcome. Participants recovered agents{\textquoteright} desires throughout. When the agent observed, but did not cause the outcome, participants{\textquoteright} ability to recover the agent{\textquoteright}s beliefs depended on the evidence they got (i.e., her reaction only to the actual outcome or to both the expected and actual outcomes; Experiments 1 and 2). When the agent caused the event, participants{\textquoteright} judgments also depended on the probability of the action (Experiments 3 and 4); when actions were improbable given the mental states, people failed to recover the agent{\textquoteright}s beliefs even when they saw her react to both the anticipated and actual outcomes. A Bayesian model captured human performance throughout (rs >= .95), consistent with the proposal that people rationally integrate information about others{\textquoteright} actions and emotional reactions to infer their unobservable mental states.

}, author = {Wu, Yang and Chris Baker and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @article {2736, title = {Changing minds: Children{\textquoteright}s inferences about third party belief revision}, journal = {Developmental Science}, year = {2017}, month = {05/2017}, pages = {e12553}, abstract = {

By the age of five, children explicitly represent that agents can have both true and false beliefs

based on epistemic access to information (e.g., Wellman, Cross, \& Watson, 2001). Children also begin to understand that agents can view identical evidence and draw different inferences from it (e.g., Carpenter \& Chandler, 1996). However, much less is known about when, and under what conditions, children expect other agents to change their minds. Here, inspired by formal ideal observer models of learning, we investigate children{\textquoteright}s expectations of the dynamics that underlie third parties{\textquoteright} belief revision. We introduce an agent who has prior beliefs about the location of a population of toys and then observes evidence that, from an ideal observer perspective, either does, or does not justify revising those beliefs. We show that children{\textquoteright}s inferences on behalf of third parties are consistent with the ideal observer perspective, but not with a number of alternative possibilities, including that children expect other agents to be influenced only by their prior beliefs, only by the sampling process, or only by the observed data. Rather, children integrate all three factors in determining how and when agents will update their beliefs from evidence.\ 

}, keywords = {learning, rational action, theory of mind}, doi = {10.1111/desc.12553}, author = {Rachel Magid and Phyllis Yan and Max Siegel and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @article {3621, title = {Children understand that agents maximize expected utilities.}, journal = {Journal of Experimental Psychology: General}, volume = {146}, year = {2017}, month = {Jan-11-2017}, pages = {1574 - 1585}, abstract = {

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{\textemdash}the rewards they attain minus the costs they incur. This assumption enables observers to work backward from agents{\textquoteright} observed behavior to their underlying beliefs, preferences, and competencies. Intuitively, however, agents may have incomplete, uncertain, or wrong beliefs about what they want. More formally, agents try to maximize their expected utilities. This understanding is crucial when reasoning about others{\textquoteright} behavior: It dictates when actions reveal preferences, and it makes predictions about the stability of behavior over time. In a set of 7 experiments we show that 4- and 5-year-olds understand that agents try to maximize expected utilities, and that these responses cannot be explained by simpler accounts. In particular, these results suggest a modification to the standard belief/desire model of intuitive psychology. Children do not treat beliefs and desires as independent; rather, they recognize that agents have beliefs about their own desires and that this has consequences for the interpretation of agents{\textquoteright} actions.

}, issn = {0096-3445}, doi = {10.1037/xge0000345}, url = {http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000345http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/146/11/1574.pdf}, author = {Julian Jara-Ettinger and Floyd, Samantha and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @article {3063, title = {Infants make more attempts to achieve a goal when they see adults persist}, journal = {Science}, volume = {357}, year = {2017}, month = {Oct-09-2018}, pages = {1290 - 1294}, abstract = {

Persistence, above and beyond IQ, is associated with long-term academic outcomes. To look at the effect of adult models on infants{\textquoteright} persistence, we conducted an experiment in which 15-month-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: an Effort condition in which they saw an adult try repeatedly, using various methods, to achieve each of two different goals; a No Effort condition in which the adult achieved the goals effortlessly; or a Baseline condition. Infants were then given a difficult, novel task. Across an initial study and two preregistered experiments (N = 262), infants in the Effort condition made more attempts to achieve the goal than did infants in the other conditions. Pedagogical cues modulated the effect. The results suggest that adult models causally affect infants{\textquoteright} persistence and that infants can generalize the value of persistence to novel tasks.

}, issn = {0036-8075}, doi = {10.1126/science.aan2317}, url = {http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aan2317https://syndication.highwire.org/content/doi/10.1126/science.aan2317https://syndication.highwire.org/content/doi/10.1126/science.aan2317}, author = {Leonard, Julia A. and Lee, Yuna and Laura Schulz} } @article {2733, title = {Inferring Beliefs and Desires From Emotional Reactions to Anticipated and Observed Events}, journal = {Child Development}, year = {2017}, month = {03/2017}, abstract = {

Researchers have long been interested in the relation between emotion understanding and theory of mind. This study investigates a cue to mental states that has rarely been investigated: the dynamics of valenced emotional expressions. When the valence of a character{\textquoteright}s facial expression was stable between an expected and observed outcome, children (N\ =\ 122; M\ =\ 5.0\ years) recovered the character{\textquoteright}s desires but did not consistently recover her beliefs. When the valence changed, older but not younger children recovered both the characters{\textquoteright} beliefs and desires. In contrast, adults jointly recovered agents{\textquoteright} beliefs and desires in all conditions. These results suggest that the ability to infer mental states from the dynamics of emotional expressions develops gradually through early and middle childhood.

}, doi = {10.1111/cdev.12759}, url = {http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12759/abstract}, author = {Yang Wu and Laura Schulz} } @article {2499, title = {Lookit (Part 1): a new online platform for developmental research}, journal = {Open Mind}, volume = {1}, year = {2017}, month = {03/2017}, author = {Scott, K M and Laura Schulz} } @article {2500, title = {Lookit (Part 2): Assessing the viability of online developmental research, Results from three case studies}, journal = {Open Mind}, volume = {1}, year = {2017}, month = {03/2017}, author = {Scott, K M and Chu, J and Laura Schulz} } @article {2737, title = {Moral alchemy: How love changes norms}, journal = {Cognition}, volume = {167}, year = {2017}, month = {10/2017}, pages = {135 -150}, chapter = {135}, abstract = {

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{\textquoteright} 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{\textquoteright}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. The current study confirmed these predictions.\ 

}, keywords = {Ethics of care, Moral learning, Recursive value, Utility}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.03.003}, url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027717300689}, author = {Rachel Magid and Laura Schulz} } @article {2739, title = {One- to Four-year-olds{\textquoteright} Ability to Connect Diverse Positive Emotional Expressions to Their Probable Causes }, year = {2017}, abstract = {

Adults have a sophisticated understanding of emotions; sufficiently sophisticated that English-speakers appreciate the distinction between feeling airy and animated, and terror and horror.\  To the degree that we make these distinctions, we represent not only the meaning of these emotion words, but also the causes and contexts that elicit them and the expressions and vocalizations that accompany them. The current study investigates how this rich understanding develops in childhood.

Previous research has found that infants can distinguish diverse emotional expressions and match emotional faces with their voices (e.g., Field, et al., 1982; Soderstrom, et al., 2015; Soken \& Pick, 1999; Walker-Andrews, 1997). They also represent positive and negative emotions in terms of their external causes and internal mental states (e.g., desires). For example, ten-month-olds refer to their parents{\textquoteright} facial expressions (i.e., positive or negative) in response to ambiguous stimuli (e.g., Klinnert, 1984; Moses, et al., 2001; Sorce, et al., 1985; Walden \& Ogan, 1988). They also expect an agent to feel positive rather than negative when she achieves her goal (Skerry \& Spelke, 2014). By eighteen months, toddlers can recover someone{\textquoteright}s likes and dislikes from her vocalizations ({\textquotedblleft}Yummy{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}Yucky{\textquotedblright}) together with her emotional response (Repacholi \& Gopnik, 1997). However, little evidence has found that infants and toddlers can make distinctive causal inferences from within-valence emotions. Some researchers have thus proposed that a relatively fine-grained understanding of emotion emerges only gradually after two years old (e.g., Bormann-Kischkel, et al., 1990; Bullock \& Russell, 1984; 1985; 1986; Russell \& Widen, 2002; Widen \& Russell, 2003; 2008; 2010).

In our study, we investigate such fine-grained understanding by looking at young children{\textquoteright}s ability to map diverse within-valence emotional expressions with their probable causes. We started with testing two- to four-year-olds (Experiment 1). Using a forced-choice task, children successfully identified the causes of positive vocal expressions elicited by exciting, delicious, adorable, funny, and sympathetic events (Figure 1; two-year-olds: M=.60, t(15)=2.745, p=.015; three-year-olds: M=.68, t(15)=3.637, p=.002; four-year-olds: M=.90, t(15)=29.589, p\<.001). Using the same materials, similar results obtained in a preferential looking paradigm with 18-23-month-olds (Figure 2; the effect of Time: F(6, 490) = 6.55, p \< .001 for the initial sample and F(6, 527) = 6.96, p \< .001 for the replication). No effect of emotion categories throughout. In Experiment 3, we used a manual search paradigm with 12-17-month-olds. During the experiment, the experimenter looked into a box and made an emotional vocalization (i.e., either {\textquotedblleft}Aww{\textellipsis}{\textquotedblright} indicating something cute, or {\textquotedblleft}Mmm{\textellipsis}{\textquotedblright} indicating something delicious). We found a trend suggesting that 12-17-month-olds searched longer in the box when they found a toy incongruent with the vocalization (i.e., hearing {\textquotedblleft}Aww{\textquotedblright} and finding a banana, or hearing {\textquotedblleft}Mmm{\textquotedblright} and finding a stuffed animal) than when they found one congruent (i.e., hearing {\textquotedblleft}Aww{\textquotedblright} and finding a stuffed animal, or hearing {\textquotedblleft}Mmm{\textquotedblright} and finding a banana; T=18.89, p=.083; permutation test). A pre-registered replication found similar results (T=35.35, p=.053). These results suggest that infants have the emerging ability to discriminate within-valence emotional expressions and infer their probable causes.

}, author = {Wu, Yang and Muentener, Paul and Laura Schulz} } @article {2740, title = {The invisible hand: Toddlers connect probabilistic events with agentive causes}, journal = {Cognitive Science}, volume = {40}, year = {2016}, pages = {23}, chapter = {1854}, abstract = {

Children posit unobserved causes when events appear to occur spontaneously (e.g., Gelman \& Gottfried, 1996).\  What about when events appear to occur probabilistically? Here toddlers (mean: 20.1 months) saw arbitrary causal relationships (Cause A generated Effect A; Cause B generated Effect B) in a fixed, alternating order. The relationships were then changed in one of two ways.\  In the Deterministic condition, the event order changed (Event B preceded Event A); in the Probabilistic condition, the causal relationships changed (Cause A generated Effect B; Cause B generated Effect A). As intended, toddlers looked equally long at both changes (Experiment 1). We then introduced a previously unseen candidate cause.\  Toddlers looked longer at the appearance of a hand (Experiment 2) and novel agent (Experiment 3) in the Deterministic than the Probabilistic conditions, but looked equally long at novel non-agents (Experiment 4), suggesting that by two, toddlers connect probabilistic events with unobserved agents.

}, author = {Wu, Yang and Muentener, Paul and Laura Schulz} } @article {2492, title = {The naive utility calculus: computational principles underlying social cognition}, journal = {Trends Cogn Sci.}, year = {2016}, doi = {10.1016/j.tics.2016.05.011}, url = {https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27388875}, author = {Julian Jara-Ettinger and Hyowon Gweon and Laura Schulz and Joshua B. Tenenbaum} } @article {1194, title = {Children{\textquoteright}s understanding of the costs and rewards underlying rational action}, journal = {Cognition}, volume = {140}, year = {2015}, month = {07/2015}, pages = {14{\textendash}23}, abstract = {

Humans explain and predict other agents{\textquoteright} 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 expectation of rational action is instantiated by a na{\"\i}ve utility calculus sensitive to both agent-constant and agent-specific aspects of costs and rewards associated with actions. In four experiments, we show that, given an agent{\textquoteright}s choices, children (range: 5-6 year olds; N=96) can infer unobservable aspects of costs (differences in agents{\textquoteright} competence) from information about subjective differences in rewards (differences in agents{\textquoteright} preferences) and vice versa. Moreover, children can design informative experiments on both objects and agents to infer unobservable constraints on agents{\textquoteright} actions.

}, doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.006}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027715000566}, author = {Julian Jara-Ettinger and Hyowon Gweon and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @proceedings {1204, title = {A fine-grained understanding of emotions: Young children match within-valence emotional expressions to their causes}, year = {2015}, month = {07/2015}, pages = {2685-2690}, author = {Yang Wu and Laura Schulz} } @proceedings {1205, title = {Hypothesis-Space Constraints in Causal Learning}, year = {2015}, month = {07/2015}, address = {Pasadena, CA}, url = {https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2015/papers/0418/index.html}, author = {Pedro Tsividis and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @article {1195, title = {Imagination and the generation of new ideas}, journal = {Cognitive Development}, volume = {34}, year = {2015}, month = {April{\textendash}June 2015}, pages = {99{\textendash}110}, doi = {10.1016/j.cogdev.2014.12.008}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885201414000744}, author = {Rachel Magid}, editor = {Mark Sheskin} } @article {1811, title = {Information Selection in Noisy Environments with Large Action Spaces}, volume = {Columbus, OH}, year = {2015}, author = {Pedro Tsividis and Samuel J Gershman and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @article {839, title = {Moving the lab home: validation of a web-based system for developmental studies}, year = {2015}, abstract = {

Moving the lab home: validation of a web-based system for developmental studies

Many practical considerations affect the kinds of scientific questions typically pursued by developmental labs.\  Sample size is limited by the resources involved in participant recruitment and outreach, which constrains investigations to phenomena expected to manifest in most children and generate large condition differences. Special populations and longitudinal designs are often avoided outside of historically specialized labs because of the resources involved in recruitment and testing.\  These practical constraints limit our ability to establish small or graded effects and to learn about specific disorders, individual differences, and the effects of interventions.\ 

We present a novel online interface\  for infant and child recruitment and testing to enable large-scale participation in developmental studies, analogous to the kind of participation enabled by Amazon Mechanical Turk in adult cognitive science. \ While families complete a short, browser-based developmental study, webcam recording is conducted programmatically using a custom-written, freely available Javascript library which interfaces with Flash.

Initial tests of the online studies demonstrated that preferential looking is easily elicited and detected from a webcam recording (see Figure 1). Study 1 validated preferential looking measures by replicating Experiment 2 of Yuan \& Fisher (2009), which found that 2-year-olds could store information about the syntactic structure of a novel verb{\textemdash}even before learning what the verb meant.\  As in the original paper, two-year-olds who heard a novel transitive verb spent proportionately more of their time looking at two-participant events compared to those who heard an intransitive verb when asked to find the novel verb (interaction between transitivity and question type, p = 0.05; N = 48 2-year-olds tested either on either a computer-based, webcam-recorded protocol in the lab or an identical protocol online).\ 

Study 2 validated verbal response measures in preschoolers by replicating a study by Schulz, Bonawitz, \& Griffiths (2007) which demonstrated that by age 4-5 preschoolers take into account both prior beliefs and statistical evidence in attributing causal power; however, statistical evidence was taken into account by younger children only for initially plausible relationships. 64 3-year-olds (aged 36 to 42 months) and 105 4-year-olds (aged 48 to 60 months) have participated in a storybook-based online causal reasoning study.\  Their verbal responses are consistent with a qualitative replication of the age trend reported in Schulz et al. (2007) (see Figure 2).

Study 3 is a replication of work by Pasquini et al. (2007) on preschoolers{\textquoteright} sensitivity to informant accuracy in epistemic trust, further validating verbal response measures using video stimuli and a purely online population.\  Study 4 uses a replication of Teglas et al. (2007) to investigate differences in looking time measures online and in the lab.

We believe that most methods currently used in behavioral developmental research {\textendash} looking-time and preferential looking studies, forced choice questions, structured interviews, and reaching tasks {\textendash} can be transferred to the online environment. By reducing practical constraints on research with young children, we do not simply make life easier for researchers: we can expand the scope of the questions asked and make it more possible to run the scientifically right study to answer a question of interest.

}, author = {Kim Scott}, editor = {Laura Schulz} } @article {1206, title = {Not So Innocent: Toddlers{\textquoteright} Inferences About Costs and Culpability}, journal = {Psychological Science }, volume = {26}, year = {2015}, month = {05/2015}, pages = {633-40}, abstract = {

Adults{\textquoteright} social evaluations are influenced by their perception of other people{\textquoteright}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{\textquoteright}s social evaluations are affected by the costs that agents incur. We found that toddlers can use the time and effort associated with goal-directed actions to distinguish agents, and that children prefer agents who incur fewer costs in completing a goal. When two agents refuse to help, children retain a preference for the more competent agent but infer that the less competent agent is nicer. These results suggest that children value agents who incur fewer costs, but understand that failure to engage in a low-cost action implies a lack of motivation. We propose that a naive utility calculus underlies inferences from the costs and rewards of goal-directed action and thereby supports social cognition.

}, keywords = {cognitive development, open data, open materials, social cognition, theory of mind}, doi = {10.1177/0956797615572806}, url = {http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/09/0956797615572806}, author = {Julian Jara-Ettinger}, editor = {Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} } @proceedings {1203, title = {Quit while you{\textquoteright}re ahead: Preschoolers{\textquoteright} persistence and willingness to accept challenges are affected by social comparison.}, year = {2015}, month = {07/2015}, address = {Pasadena, CA}, author = {Rachel Magid and Laura Schulz} } @conference {1298, title = {Preschoolers expect others to learn rationally from evidence}, booktitle = {Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society}, year = {2014}, abstract = {

Even infants expect agents to act rationally in pursuit of their\  goals. However, little research has looked at whether young\  children expect other agents to learn rationally. In the\  current study, we investigated 4.5- to 6-year-olds{\textquoteright} reasoning\  about another agent{\textquoteright}s beliefs after the agent observed a\  sample drawn randomly or selectively from a population.\  We found that those children who could correctly track both\  the true state of the world and the other agent{\textquoteright}s initial beliefs\  expected the other agent to learn rationally from the data.\  Critically, this inference depended upon but could not be\  reduced to either the child{\textquoteright}s own understanding of the world,\  or the child{\textquoteright}s own inferences from the sampling process,\  suggesting that the ability to integrate these component\  processes underlies a developing understanding of the way\  in which evidence informs others{\textquoteright} beliefs.

}, keywords = {learning, rational action, theory of mind}, author = {Phyllis Yan and Rachel Magid and Laura Schulz} }