Publications

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Year:
(2026). Imagining and building wise machines: The centrality of AI metacognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

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(2025). How children map causal verbs to different causes across development. Nature Human Behaviour.

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(2025). Spot the ball: A benchmark for visual social inference. arXiv.

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(2025). Constructing causal stories: How mental models shape memory, prediction, and generalization. PsyArXiv.

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(2025). Probing counterfactual thinking without counterfactual language. PsyArXiv.

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(2025). Actual or counterfactual? Asymmetric responsibility attributions in language models. NeurIPS Workshop ‘CogInterp: Interpreting Cognition in Deep Learning Models’.

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(2025). A signaling theory of self-handicapping. Cognition.

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(2025). Multimodal inference through mental simulation. PsyArXiv.

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(2025). Modeling open-world cognition as on-demand synthesis of probabilistic models. NeurIPS Workshop ‘Bridging Language, Agent, and World Models for Reasoning and Planning’.
Spotlight at NeurIPS Workshop

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(2025). A framework for blaming willful ignorance. Current Opinion in Psychology.

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(2025). Understanding human limits in pattern recognition: A computational model of sequential reasoning in rock, paper, scissors. Computational Cognitive Neuroscience.

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(2025). Causal-PIK: Causality-based physical reasoning with a physics-informed kernel. 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning.

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(2025). Cause and fault in development. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Generics revisited: Analyzing generalizations in children's books and caregivers' speech. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). How do we get to know someone? Diagnostic questions for inferring personal traits. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Language models assign responsibility based on actual rather than counterfactual contributions. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Learning from 'what might have been': A Bayesian model of learning from regret. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Learning to plan from observed and counterfactual experiences. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Leave a trace: Recursive reasoning about deceptive behavior. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Taking others for granted: Balancing personal and presentational goals in action selection. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Toward a formal pragmatics of explanation. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). A communication-first account of explanation. arXiv.

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(2025). Looking back to plan ahead: Causal judgments as a sampling approximation for action effectiveness. PsyArXiv.

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(2025). When AI meets counterfactuals: The ethical implications of counterfactual world simulation models. AI and Ethics.

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(2025). Causation, meaning, and communication. Psychological Review.

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(2025). Inference from social evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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(2025). From artifacts to human lives: Investigating the domain-generality of judgments about purposes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

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(2025). Good explanations fit prior knowledge. Abstract in Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing.

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(2025). Spot the ball: Inferring hidden information from human behavioral cues. Abstract in the Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2025). Young children use mental simulation to reason about their performance. Abstract in the Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Self-supervised alignment with mutual information: Learning to follow principles without preference labels. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

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(2024). MARPLE: A benchmark for long-horizon inference. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

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(2024). Human-like Affective Cognition in Foundation Models. arXiv.

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(2024). To err is robotic: Rapid value-based trial-and-error during deployment. arXiv.

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(2024). Counterfactual simulation in causal cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

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(2024). Children use disagreement to infer what happened. Cognition.

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(2024). Whodunnit? Inferring what happened from multimodal evidence. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Towards a computational model of responsibility judgments in sequential human-AI collaboration. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Without his cookies, he's just a monster: A counterfactual simulation model of social explanation. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Chain versus common cause: Biased causal strength judgments in humans and large language models. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Do as I explain: Explanations communicate optimal interventions. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Biased causal strength judgments in humans and large language models. ICLR 2024 Workshop on Representational Alignment.

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(2024). Resource-rational moral judgment. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). Procedural dilemma generation for evaluating moral reasoning in humans and language models. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2024). STaR-GATE: Teaching language models to ask clarifying questions. Conference on Language Modeling (COLM).

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(2024). Probabilistic models of physical reasoning. Bayesian Models of Cognition: Reverse Engineering the Mind.

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(2024). Probabilistic programs as a unifying language of thought. Reverse-engineering the mind: The Bayesian approach to cognitive science.

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(2023). Anticipating the risks and benefits of counterfactual world simulation models. AI Meets Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology Workshop (NeurIPS 2023).

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(2023). Off the rails: Procedural dilemma generation for moral reasoning. AI Meets Moral Philosophy and Moral Psychology Workshop (NeurIPS 2023).

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(2023). Social contract AI: Aligning AI assistants with implicit group norms. Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research Workshop (NeurIPS 2023).
Oral at NeurIPS Workshop

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(2023). If not me, then who? Responsibility and replacement. Cognition.

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(2023). MoCa: Measuring human-language model alignment on causal and moral judgment tasks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

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(2023). Realism of visual, auditory, and haptic cues in phenomenal causality. IEEE World Haptics Conference (WHC).
Best Work-in-Progress Award

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(2023). Understanding social reasoning in language models with language models. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
Spotlight at NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Track

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(2023). Making a positive difference: Criticality in groups. Cognition.

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(2023). A computational model of responsibility judgments from counterfactual simulations and intention inferences. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). Father, don't forgive them, for they could have known what they're doing. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). Show and tell: Learning causal structures from observations and explanations. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). You are what you're for: Essentialist categorization in large language models. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). A semantics for causing, enabling, and preventing verbs using structural causal models. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). Causal reasoning across agents and objects. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). Learning what matters: Causal abstraction in human inference. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). Teleology and generics. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2023). Mental Jenga: A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments about physical support. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

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(2023). Active causal structure learning in continuous time. Cognitive Psychology.

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(2023). Explanations can reduce overreliance on AI systems during decision-making. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
Best Paper Honorable Mention at CSCW 2023

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(2022). What would have happened? Counterfactuals, hypotheticals, and causal judgments. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

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(2022). Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. arXiv.

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(2022). Stop, children what's that sound? Multi-modal inference through mental simulation. Cognitive Science Proceedings.

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(2022). That was close! A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments about decisions. Cognitive Science Proceedings.

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(2022). Looking into the past: Eye-tracking mental simulation in physical inference. Cognitive Science Proceedings.

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(2022). Do humans trust advice more if it comes from AI? An analysis of human-AI interactions. Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.

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(2022). Inference from explanation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

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(2022). Uncalibrated models can improve human-AI collaboration. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.

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(2021). Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology. Cognition.

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(2021). A counterfactual simulation model of causation by omission. Cognition.

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(2021). Predicting responsibility judgments from dispositional inferences and causal attributions. Cognitive Psychology.

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(2021). A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments for physical events. Psychological Review.

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(2021). Who went fishing? Inferences from social evaluations. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2021). The trajectory of counterfactual simulation in development. Developmental Psychology.

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(2020). Expectations affect physical causation judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

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(2020). The language of causation. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2020). Whom will Granny thank? Thinking about what could have been informs children's inferences about relative helpfulness. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2020). Causal responsibility and robust causation. Frontiers in Psychology.

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(2020). Moral values pervade implicit and explicit causal attribution: Evidence from basic language processing. Cognitive Science.

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(2019). Explaining intuitive difficulty judgments by modeling physical effort and risk. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2019). Intervening in time. Time and Causality Across the Sciences.

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(2019). Quantitative causal selection patterns in token causation. PLoS ONE.

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(2019). The trajectory of counterfactual simulation in development. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2018). Time in causal structure learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

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(2018). Intuitive experimentation in the physical world. Cognitive Psychology.

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(2018). Lucky or clever? From expectations to responsibility judgments. Cognition.

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(2018). What's fair? How children assign reward to members of teams with differing causal structures. Cognition.

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(2018). Tiptoeing around it: Inference from absence in potentially offensive speech. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2018). What happened? Reconstructing the past from vision and sound. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2017). Eye-tracking causality. Psychological Science.

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(2017). Causal learning from interventions and dynamics in continuous time. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2017). Causation in legal and moral reasoning. Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.

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(2017). Faulty towers: A hypothetical simulation model of physical support. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2017). Intuitive theories. Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.

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(2017). Marbles in inaction: Counterfactual simulation and causation by omission. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2017). Physical problem solving: Joint planning with symbolic, geometric, and dynamic constraints. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2016). Implicit measurement of motivated causal attribution. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2016). Natural science: Active learning in dynamic physical microworlds. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2016). Plans, habits, and theory of mind. PLoS ONE.

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(2016). Understanding 'almost': Empirical and computational studies of near misses. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2015). A difference-making framework for intuitive judgments of responsibility. Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.

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(2015). Causal conceptions in social explanation and moral evaluation: A historical tour. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

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(2015). Causal superseding. Cognition.

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(2015). Concepts in a probabilistic language of thought. The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts.

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(2015). Go fishing! Responsibility judgments when cooperation breaks down. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2015). How, whether, why: Causal judgments as counterfactual contrasts. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2015). Inference of intention and permissibility in moral decision making. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2015). Responsibility judgments in voting scenarios. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2014). Attributing responsibility: Actual and counterfactual worlds. Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy.

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(2014). Causal supersession. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2014). From counterfactual simulation to causal judgment. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2014). The order of things: Inferring causal structure from temporal patterns. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2014). Wins above replacement: Responsibility attributions as counterfactual replacements. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2013). Back on track: Backtracking in counterfactual reasoning. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2013). Causal responsibility and counterfactuals. Cognitive Science.

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(2013). Making a difference: Responsibility, causality, and counterfactuals. Unpublished PhD thesis.

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(2012). Finding fault: Counterfactuals and causality in group attributions. Cognition.

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(2012). Noisy Newtons: Unifying process and dependency accounts of causal attribution. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2012). Ping Pong in Church: Productive use of concepts in human probabilistic inference. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2012). When contributions make a difference: Explaining order effects in responsibility attributions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

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(2012). Why blame Bob? Probabilistic generative models, counterfactual reasoning, and blame attribution. Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2011). Beyond outcomes: The influence of intentions and deception. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2011). Blame the skilled. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2011). Rational order effects in responsibility attributions. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2010). Observing and intervening: Rational and heuristic models of causal decision making. Open Psychology Journal.

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(2010). Spreading the blame: The allocation of responsibility amongst multiple agents. Cognition.

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(2010). The dice are cast: The role of intended versus actual contributions in responsibility attribution. Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

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(2009). The allocation of responsibility amongst multiple causes. Unpublished MSc thesis.

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