To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring
relationships between people: Humans need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose …

From early childhood, humans demonstrate an understanding of ownership and the rights it
confers to owners. This understanding impacts how children reason about people's actions …

Great storytellers know how to take us on a journey. They direct characters to act—not
necessarily in the most rational way—but rather in a way that leads to interesting situations …

Great storytelling takes us on a journey the way ordinary reality rarely does. But what exactly
do we mean by this “journey?” Recently, literary theorist Karin Kukkonen proposed that …

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 …

Recent studies suggest children's exploratory play is consistent with formal accounts of
rational learning. Here we focus on the tension between this view and a nearly ubiquitous …

How do humans build and navigate their complex social world? Standard theoretical
frameworks often attribute this success to a foundational capacity to analyze other people's …

The current locations of objects are informative about the temporal order of past events. For
example, by simply examining the locations of objects underground, geologists and …

Recent studies suggest children's exploratory play is consistent with formal accounts of
rational learning. Here we focus on the tension between this view and a nearly ubiquitous …

As we navigate through the world, we often leave traces of our actions: a broken branch, a
footprint in the mud, a dirty coffee mug at a desk. As observers, these traces enable us to …