We know far more than what we can directly experience. We learn about the world by drawing rich, abstract inductive inferences that go beyond what we can observe, and much of these observations come from behaviors of others around us. By engaging in social learning in diverse contexts, humans learn from others, share their knowledge with others, and even accumulate a body of cultural knowledge over generations.
The Social Learning Lab (SLL) aims to understand the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the communicative interactions we experience in our lives. In particular, the ways in which young children learn from others provide a unique window to the interface between our ability to draw powerful inferences and to our understanding of others’ thoughts and actions (Theory of Mind). To better understand this process, we design and conduct behavioral experiments with young children and adults, often combined with computational models that help predict and explain behavioral results.