Research Projects
Explanation & Causation
How do we explain why things happen, and how do our explanations shape what we learn? Our research examines how children and adults generate, evaluate, and communicate explanations about the physical and social world. We investigate how explaining shapes the hypotheses learners consider, their attention to evidence, and their discovery of underlying mechanisms. We also ask what makes explanations informative or satisfying and what listeners infer beyond what is explicitly communicated.
A central focus is causal selection: how people decide which contributing factors best explain an outcome. We examine the roles of causal structure, normality, imagined alternatives, and preferences for “ideal” causes with fast, strong, and stable effects. Related work explores explanations of structural inequality and variation in causal reasoning across cultural and socioeconomic contexts and developmental differences.
Intuitive Science and Self-Directed Learning
How do children decide what to investigate, what evidence to seek, and when to change their minds? Our research examines how children direct their learning through exploration, experimentation, and question asking. We investigate how causal knowledge helps learners formulate relevant questions, design informative tests, and interpret evidence. We also examine how tasks and learning environments shape children’s approaches to inquiry and our ability to recognize their scientific reasoning skills.
Related work explores how children coordinate existing beliefs with new evidence. We study how learners detect inconsistencies, evaluate observations that challenge their expectations, and decide whether to revise a hypothesis. We also ask how monitoring the consistency of their beliefs and integrating conflicting perspectives help children develop a more coherent understanding.
Abstract & Relational Reasoning
How do children discover abstract patterns that connect seemingly different objects, events, and problems? Our research examines how learners represent relations such as “same” and “different,” infer principles such as variability and uniformity, and recognize shared causal structures. We investigate how language, culture, and experience shape these abilities, how comparison, explanation, and gesture support analogical transfer, and how abstract concepts change through repeated use.
Our ongoing work extends these questions to compositionality and function learning. We examine how children combine familiar operations into hierarchical structures and learn quantitative relationships between inputs and outcomes. We also investigate how causal knowledge shapes this learning and supports generalization beyond observed examples.
Uncertainty & Learning Contexts
How do children understand uncertainty, and how does it guide their decisions? Our research examines how learners reason about causes that produce effects only some of the time, use variability to predict novel outcomes, and assess the limits of their knowledge. We investigate when children’s actions reveal sensitivity to uncertainty before they can explicitly describe it, and how exploration and disconfirming evidence help them calibrate their confidence.
We also examine how dispositions, goals, and learning contexts shape responses to uncertainty. We study individual differences in uncertainty tolerance—children’s willingness to engage with situations in which outcomes or answers are unknown—and how these differences relate to learning and exploration. Our work asks when children explore, persist, or change strategies; how they balance immediate success against acquiring knowledge useful in the future; and how they adapt to environments that differ in variability and predictability.
Reasoning About Alternative Possibilities
How do children reason beyond what actually happened to consider what could happen—or what could have happened instead? Our research examines how children represent and act on multiple possibilities, distinguish possible from necessary outcomes, and use causal knowledge to constrain hypothetical reasoning. We ask how learners keep track of alternatives and draw conclusions about situations they have not directly observed.
A central focus is counterfactual reasoning: imagining how an outcome would differ if an earlier event had changed. We investigate how counterfactuals and thought experiments can be used to support scientific inquiry and shape judgments about people’s choices, constraints, and societal outcomes. Related work examines how temporal understanding guides this reasoning, including children’s recognition that actions can change the future but cannot change the past.
