I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human
childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the …

Despite a growing body of research devoted to the study of how humans encode
environmental patterns, there is still no clear consensus about the nature of the …

How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human
developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and …

Intuitively, children appear to be more exploratory than adults, and this exploration seems to
help children learn,. However, there have been few clear tests of these ideas. We test …

Cognitive development is marked by age-related improvements across a number of
domains, as young children perform worse than their older counterparts on most tasks …

Declines in episodic memory in older adults are typically attributed to differences in
encoding strategies and/or retrieval processes. These views omit a critical factor in age …

We present a review of frequency effects in memory, accompanied by a theory of memory,
according to which the storage of new information in long-term memory (LTM) depletes a …

Statistical learning enables learners to extract the environmental regularities necessary to
piece together the structure of their worlds. The capacity for statistical learning and its …

Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last
few decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from …

Cognitive control allows one to focus one's attention efficiently on relevant information while
filtering out irrelevant information. This ability provides a means of rapid and effective …