-
52When Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence: Rational Inferences From Absent DataCognitive Science 41 (S5): 1155-1167. 2017.Identifying patterns in the world requires noticing not only unusual occurrences, but also unusual absences. We examined how people learn from absences, manipulating the extent to which an absence is expected. People can make two types of inferences from the absence of an event: either the event is possible but has not yet occurred, or the event never occurs. A rational analysis using Bayesian inference predicts that inferences from absent data should depend on how much the absence is expected t…Read more
-
109The Effects of Cultural Transmission Are Modulated by the Amount of Information TransmittedCognitive Science 37 (5): 953-967. 2013.Information changes as it is passed from person to person, with this process of cultural transmission allowing the minds of individuals to shape the information that they transmit. We present mathematical models of cultural transmission which predict that the amount of information passed from person to person should affect the rate at which that information changes. We tested this prediction using a function-learning task, in which people learn a functional relationship between two variables by …Read more
-
43Rational variability in children’s causal inferences: The Sampling HypothesisCognition 126 (2): 285-300. 2013.
-
58The imaginary fundamentalists: The unshocking truth about Bayesian cognitive scienceBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (4): 194-196. 2011.If Bayesian Fundamentalism existed, Jones & Love's (J&L's) arguments would provide a necessary corrective. But it does not. Bayesian cognitive science is deeply concerned with characterizing algorithms and representations, and, ultimately, implementations in neural circuits; it pays close attention to environmental structure and the constraints of behavioral data, when available; and it rigorously compares multiple models, both within and across papers. J&L's recommendation of Bayesian Enlighten…Read more
-
45Children’s imitation of causal action sequences is influenced by statistical and pedagogical evidenceCognition 120 (3): 331-340. 2011.
-
14Formalizing Neurath’s ship: Approximate algorithms for online causal learningPsychological Review 124 (3): 301-338. 2017.
-
197Seeking Confirmation Is Rational for Deterministic HypothesesCognitive Science 35 (3): 499-526. 2011.The tendency to test outcomes that are predicted by our current theory (the confirmation bias) is one of the best-known biases of human decision making. We prove that the confirmation bias is an optimal strategy for testing hypotheses when those hypotheses are deterministic, each making a single prediction about the next event in a sequence. Our proof applies for two normative standards commonly used for evaluating hypothesis testing: maximizing expected information gain and maximizing the proba…Read more
-
15A nonparametric Bayesian framework for constructing flexible feature representationsPsychological Review 120 (4): 817-851. 2013.
-
28Random walks on semantic networks can resemble optimal foragingPsychological Review 122 (3): 558-569. 2015.
-
40Rational approximations to rational models: Alternative algorithms for category learningPsychological Review 117 (4): 1144-1167. 2010.
-
13Learning to Learn FunctionsCognitive Science 47 (4). 2023.Humans can learn complex functional relationships between variables from small amounts of data. In doing so, they draw on prior expectations about the form of these relationships. In three experiments, we show that people learn to adjust these expectations through experience, learning about the likely forms of the functions they will encounter. Previous work has used Gaussian processes—a statistical framework that extends Bayesian nonparametric approaches to regression—to model human function le…Read more
-
10Iterated learning reveals stereotypes of facial trustworthiness that propagate in the absence of evidenceCognition 237 (C): 105452. 2023.
-
20Extracting Low‐Dimensional Psychological Representations from Convolutional Neural NetworksCognitive Science 47 (1). 2023.Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly widely used in psychology and neuroscience to predict how human minds and brains respond to visual images. Typically, CNNs represent these images using thousands of features that are learned through extensive training on image datasets. This raises a question: How many of these features are really needed to model human behavior? Here, we attempt to estimate the number of dimensions in CNN representations that are required to capture human psy…Read more
-
10Show or tell? Exploring when (and why) teaching with language outperforms demonstrationCognition 232 (C): 105326. 2023.
-
34Overrepresentation of extreme events in decision making reflects rational use of cognitive resourcesPsychological Review 125 (1): 1-32. 2018.
-
32Overcoming Individual Limitations Through Distributed Computation: Rational Information Accumulation in Multigenerational PopulationsTopics in Cognitive Science 14 (3): 550-573. 2022.Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 550-573, July 2022.
-
15Shades of confusion: Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication taskCognition 225 (C): 105152. 2022.
-
34From partners to populations: A hierarchical Bayesian account of coordination and conventionPsychological Review 130 (4): 977-1016. 2023.
-
6A rational model of people’s inferences about others’ preferences based on response timesCognition 217 (C): 104885. 2021.
-
17The Challenges of Large‐Scale, Web‐Based Language Datasets: Word Length and Predictability RevisitedCognitive Science 45 (6). 2021.Language research has come to rely heavily on large‐scale, web‐based datasets. These datasets can present significant methodological challenges, requiring researchers to make a number of decisions about how they are collected, represented, and analyzed. These decisions often concern long‐standing challenges in corpus‐based language research, including determining what counts as a word, deciding which words should be analyzed, and matching sets of words across languages. We illustrate these chall…Read more
-
12Intuitions about magic track the development of intuitive physicsCognition 214 (C): 104762. 2021.
-
24Bayesian collective learning emerges from heuristic social learningCognition 212 (C): 104469. 2021.
-
25Evaluating models of robust word recognition with serial reproductionCognition 210 (C): 104553. 2021.Spoken communication occurs in a “noisy channel” characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input, robust spoken word recognition—and language processing more generally—relies heavily on listeners' prior knowledge to evaluate whether candidate interpretations of that input are more or less likely. Here we compare several broad-coverage probabilistic generative…Read more
-
10Assessing Mathematics Misunderstandings via Bayesian Inverse PlanningCognitive Science 44 (10). 2020.Online educational technologies offer opportunities for providing individualized feedback and detailed profiles of students' skills. Yet many technologies for mathematics education assess students based only on the correctness of either their final answers or responses to individual steps. In contrast, examining the choices students make for how to solve the equation and the ways in which they might answer incorrectly offers the opportunity to obtain a more nuanced perspective of their algebra s…Read more
-
Aarhus UniversityGraduate student
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |