How do essentialist beliefs about categories arise? We hypothesize that such beliefs are transmitted via language. We subject large language models (LLMs) to vignettes from the literature on essentialist categorization and find that they align well …
When choosing how to describe what happened, we have a number of causal verbs at our disposal. In this paper, we develop a model-theoretic formal semantics for nine causal verbs that span the categories of CAUSE, ENABLE, and PREVENT. We use …
This work attempts to bridge the divide between accounts of causal reasoning with respect to agents and objects. We begin by examining the influence of animacy. In a collision-based context, we vary the animacy status of an object using 3D …
What shape do people's mental models take? We hypothesize that people build causal models that are suited to the task at hand. These models abstract away information to represent what matters. To test this idea empirically, we presented participants …
Generic statements, such as "Bees are striped" are thought to be a central vehicle by which essentialist beliefs are transmitted. But work on generics and essentialism almost never focuses on the type of properties mentioned in generic statements. We …
Prior work has identified a resilient phenomenon that threatens the performance of human-AI decision-making teams: overreliance, when people agree with an AI, even when it is incorrect. Surprisingly, overreliance does not reduce when the AI produces …
Human adults can figure out what happened by combining evidence from different sensory modalities, such as vision and sound. How does the ability to integrate multi-modal information develop in early childhood? Inspired by prior computational work …
How do people make causal judgments about other's decisions? Prior work has argued that judging causation requires going beyond what actually happened and simulating what would have happened in a relevant counterfactual situation. Here, we extend the …
Mental simulation is a powerful cognitive capacity that underlies people's ability to draw inferences about what happened in the past from the present. Recent work suggests that eye-tracking can be used as a window through which one can study the …
In decision support applications of AI, the AI algorithm's output is framed as a suggestion to a human user. The user may ignore this advice or take it into consideration to modify their decision. With the increasing prevalence of such human-AI …