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34Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich propertiesCognition 133 (2): 343-357. 2014.Two studies examined the specificity of effects of explanation on learning by prompting 3- to 6-year-old children to explain a mechanical toy and comparing what they learned about the toy’s causal and non-causal properties to children who only observed the toy, both with and without accompanying verbalization. In Study 1, children were experimentally assigned to either explain or observe the mechanical toy. In Study 2, children were classified according to whether the content of their response t…Read more
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31Curiosity Is Contagious: A Social Influence Intervention to Induce CuriosityCognitive Science 45 (2). 2021.Our actions and decisions are regularly influenced by the social environment around us. Can social cues be leveraged to induce curiosity and affect subsequent behavior? Across two experiments, we show that curiosity is contagious: The social environment can influence people's curiosity about the answers to scientific questions. Participants were presented with everyday questions about science from a popular on‐line forum, and these were shown with a high or low number of up‐votes as a social cue…Read more
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30Simplicity as a Cue to Probability: Multiple Roles for Simplicity in Evaluating ExplanationsCognitive Science 46 (7). 2022.Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2022.
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28How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions?Frontiers in Psychology 11. 2021.In this paper, we investigate the informativeness of 4- to 6-year-old children’s questions using a combined qualitative and quantitative approach. Children were presented with a hierarchical version of the 20-questions game, in which they were given an array of objects that could be organized into three category levels based on shared features. We then tested whether it is possible to scaffold children’s question-asking abilities without extensive training. In particular, we supported children’s…Read more
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28Seeking evidence and explanation signals religious and scientific commitmentsCognition 238 (C): 105496. 2023.
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27Why does explaining help learning? Insight from an explanation impairment effectIn S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. 2010.
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27From conceptual representations to explanatory relationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 218-219. 2010.Machery emphasizes the centrality of explanation for theory-based approaches to concepts. I endorse Machery's emphasis on explanation and consider recent advances in psychology that point to the of explanation, with consequences for Machery's heterogeneity hypothesis about concepts
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27Children adapt their questions to achieve efficient searchCognition 143 (C): 203-216. 2015.One way to learn about the world is by asking questions. We investigate how younger children (7- to 8-year-olds), older children (9- to 11-year-olds), and young adults (17- to 18-year-olds) ask questions to identify the cause of an event. We find a developmental shift in children’s reliance on hypothesis-scanning questions (which test hypotheses directly) versus constraint-seeking questions (which reduce the space of hypotheses), but also that all age groups ask more constraint-seeking questions…Read more
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26An Actor's Knowledge and Intent Are More Important in Evaluating Moral Transgressions Than Conventional TransgressionsCognitive Science 42 (S1): 105-133. 2018.An actor's mental states—whether she acted knowingly and with bad intentions—typically play an important role in evaluating the extent to which an action is wrong and in determining appropriate levels of punishment. In four experiments, we find that this role for knowledge and intent is significantly weaker when evaluating transgressions of conventional rules as opposed to moral rules. We also find that this attenuated role for knowledge and intent is partly due to the fact that conventional rul…Read more
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26The explanatory effect of a label: Explanations with named categories are more satisfyingCognition 168 (C): 357-369. 2017.Can opium's tendency to induce sleep be explained by appeal to a "dormitive virtue"? If the label merely references the tendency being explained, the explanation seems vacuous. Yet the presence of a label could signal genuinely explanatory content concerning the (causal) basis for the property being explained. In Experiments 1 and 2, we find that explanations for a person's behavior that appeal to a named tendency or condition are indeed judged to be more satisfying than equivalent explanations …Read more
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26Explaining the moral of the storyCognition 167 (C): 266-281. 2017.Although storybooks are often used as pedagogical tools for conveying moral lessons to children, the ability to spontaneously extract "the moral" of a story develops relatively late. Instead, children tend to represent stories at a concrete level - one that highlights surface features and understates more abstract themes. Here we examine the role of explanation in 5- and 6-year-old children's developing ability to learn the moral of a story. Two experiments demonstrate that, relative to a contro…Read more
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25Explanation constrains learning, and prior knowledge constrains explanationIn S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. 2010.A great deal of research has demonstrated that learning is influenced by the learner’s prior background knowledge (e.g. Murphy, 2002; Keil, 1990), but little is known about the processes by which prior knowledge is deployed. We explore the role of explanation in deploying prior knowledge by examining the joint effects of eliciting explanations and providing prior knowledge in a task where each should aid learning. Three hypotheses are considered: that explanation and prior knowledge have indepen…Read more
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24Varieties of Ignorance: Mystery and the Unknown in Science and ReligionCognitive Science 46 (4). 2022.How and why does the moon cause the tides? How and why does God answer prayers? For many, the answer to the former question is unknown; the answer to the latter question is a mystery. Across three studies testing a largely Christian sample within the United States (N= 2524), we investigate attitudes toward ignorance and inquiry as a window onto scientific versus religious belief. In Experiment 1, we find that science and religion are associated with different forms of ignorance: scientific ignor…Read more
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23Minimally counterintuitive stimuli trigger greater curiosity than merely improbable stimuliCognition 230 (C): 105286. 2023.
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22Structural thinking about social categories: Evidence from formal explanations, generics, and generalizationCognition 204 (C): 104383. 2020.Many theories of kind representation suggest that people posit internal, essence-like factors that underlie kind membership and explain properties of category members. Across three studies (N = 281), we document the characteristics of an alternative form of construal according to which the properties of social kinds are seen as products of structural factors: stable, external constraints that obtain due to the kind’s social position. Internalist and structural construals are similar in that both…Read more
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20The Campaign for ConceptsDialogue 50 (1): 165-177. 2011.In his book Doing Without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that cognitive scientists should reject the concept of “concept” as a natural, psychological kind. I review and critique several of Machery’s arguments, focusing on his definition of “concept” and on claims against the possibility and utility of a unified account of concepts. In particular, I suggest ways in which prototype, exemplar, and theory-theory approaches to concepts might be integrated.
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19Effects of explanation on children’s question askingCognition 191 (C): 103966. 2019.The capacity to search for information effectively by asking informative questions is crucial for self-directed learning and develops throughout the preschool years and beyond. We tested the hypothesis that explaining observations in a given domain prepares children to ask more informative questions in that domain, and that it does so by promoting the identification of features that apply to multiple objects, thus supporting more effective questions. Across two experiments, 4- to 7-year-old chil…Read more
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19Deciding to be authentic: Intuition is favored over deliberation when authenticity mattersCognition 223 (C): 105021. 2022.Deliberative analysis enables us to weigh features, simulate futures, and arrive at good, tractable decisions. So why do we so often eschew deliberation, and instead rely on more intuitive, gut responses? We propose that intuition might be prescribed for some decisions because people’s folk theory of decision-making accords a special role to authenticity, which is associated with intuitive choice. Five pre-registered experiments find evidence in favor of this claim. In Experiment 1 (N = 654), we…Read more
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18Distinct Profiles for Beliefs About Religion Versus ScienceCognitive Science 47 (11). 2023.A growing body of research suggests that scientific and religious beliefs are often held and justified in different ways. In three studies with 707 participants, we examine the distinctive profiles of beliefs in these domains. In Study 1, we find that participants report evidence and explanatory considerations (making sense of things) as dominant reasons for beliefs across domains. However, cuing the religious domain elevates endorsement of nonscientific justifications for belief, such as ethica…Read more
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18Putting normativity in its proper placeBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4). 2010.Knobe considers two explanations for the influence of moral considerations on cognitive systems: the position, and the position. We suggest that this dichotomy conflates questions at computational and algorithmic levels, and suggest that distinguishing the issues at these levels reveals a third, viable option, which we call the position
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16Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 3 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2020.The new interdisciplinary field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field, by both philosophers and psychologists.
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14ExplanationIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.Explanation has been an important topic of study in philosophy of science, in epistemology, and in other areas of philosophy. In parallel, psychologists have been studying children's and adults’ explanations, including their role in inference and in learning. This entry reviews recent work that begins to bridge the philosophy and psychology of explanation, with sections introducing recent empirical work on explanation by philosophers, formal and functional accounts of explanation, inference to t…Read more
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13Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy Volume 4 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2022.The new interdisciplinary field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field, by both philosophers and psychologists.
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12Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy , Vol. 2 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.The new interdisciplinary field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field, by both philosophers and psychologists.
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9If it's important, then I’m curious: Increasing perceived usefulness stimulates curiosityCognition 226 (C): 105193. 2022.
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7Explanations and Causal Judgments Are Differentially Sensitive to Covariation and Mechanism InformationFrontiers in Psychology 13 911177. 2022.Are causal explanations (e.g., “she switched careers because of the COVID pandemic”) treated differently from the corresponding claims that one factor caused another (e.g., “the COVID pandemic caused her to switch careers”)? We examined whether explanatory and causal claims diverge in their responsiveness to two different types of information: covariation strength and mechanism information. We report five experiments with 1,730 participants total, showing that compared to judgments of causal str…Read more
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5Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Volume 2 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.The new interdisciplinary field of experimental philosophy has emerged as the methods of psychological science have been brought to bear on traditional philosophical issues. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy is the place to go to see outstanding new work in the field, by both philosophers and psychologists.
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