Learning depends on attention. The processes that cue attention in the moment dynamically
integrate learned regularities and immediate contextual cues. This paper reviews the …

How do humans develop the capacity to reason? In five studies, we examined infants'
emerging ability to make exclusion inferences using negation, as in the disjunctive syllogism …

Classic approaches to word learning emphasize referential ambiguity: In naming situations,
a novel word could refer to many possible objects, properties, actions, and so forth. To solve …

When perceptually available information is scant, we can leverage logical connections
among hypotheses to draw reliable conclusions that guide our reasoning and learning. We …

Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally
when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use …

Conventional memory theory proposes that the hippocampus is initially responsible for
encoding new information, before this responsibility is gradually transferred to the neocortex …

Four experiments explored the processes that bridge between referent selection and word
learning. Twenty‐four‐month‐old infants were presented with several novel names during a …

Although shared storybook reading is a common activity believed to improve the language
skills of preschool children, how children learn new vocabulary from such experiences has …

The learning of first object names is deemed a hard problem due to the uncertainty inherent
in mapping a heard name to the intended referent in a cluttered and variable world …

Two experiments investigated children's communicative perspective-taking ability. In
Experiment 1, 4-to 5-year-old children were tested on two referential communication tasks …