Understanding Things

We investigate how minds represent and reason about the non-social world. This includes work on relational reasoning, mental models of physical systems, over-hypothesis formation, spatial cognition, and decision-making under uncertainty. Across this area, developmental research examines how these capacities emerge and reorganize across childhood, cross-cultural research investigates how learning environments and ecologies shape them, and comparative research clarifies their evolutionary roots and limits in other great apes. This work reveals both shared foundations of physical cognition and the late-emerging forms of abstraction and explicit modelling that may be especially characteristic of humans.