Todd M Gureckis
Biographic Data
| ID | 1463655 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Todd M Gureckis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Todd M |
| FAMILY NAME | Gureckis |
| SIGNATURE | GURECKIS T M |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7139-4778 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 7 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 7 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Seeking New Information With Old Questions: Children and Adults Reuse and Recombine Concepts From Prior Questions
Question asking is a key tool for learning about the world, especially in childhood. However, formulating good questions is challenging. In any given situation, many questions are possible but only few are informative. In the present work, we investigate two ways 5- to 10-year-olds and adults simplify the challenge of formulating questions: by reusing previous questions, and by recombining components of previous questions to form new questions. I…
Children’s failure to control variables may reflect adaptive decision-making
Changing one variable at a time while controlling others is a key aspect of scientific experimentation and a central component of STEM curricula. However, children reportedly struggle to learn and implement this strategy. Why do children’s intuitions about how best to intervene on a causal system conflict with scientific practices? Mathematical analyses have shown that controlling variables is not always the most efficient learning strategy, and …
Expectations about future learning influence moment-to-moment feelings of suspense
Suspense is a cognitive and affective state that is often experienced in the anticipation of information and contributes to the enjoyment and consumption of entertainment such as movies or sports. Ely et al. proposed a formal definition of suspense which relies upon predictions about future belief updates. In order to empirically evaluate this theory, we designed a task based on the casino card game Blackjack where a variety of suspense dynamics …
Limits on simulation approaches in intuitive physics
Evaluating Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a Tool for Experimental Behavioral Research
Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online crowdsourcing service where anonymous online workers complete web-based tasks for small sums of money. The service has attracted attention from experimental psychologists interested in gathering human subject data more efficiently. However, relative to traditional laboratory studies, many aspects of the testing environment are not under the experimenter's control. In this paper, we attempt to empirically …
Thinking in groups
Is cognition an exclusive property of the individual or can groups have a mind of their own? We explore this question from the perspective of complex adaptive systems. One of the principal insights from this line of work is that rules that govern behavior at one level of analysis (the individual) can cause qualitatively different behavior at higher levels (the group). We review a number of behavioral studies from our lab that demonstrate how grou…
Common Mechanisms in Infant and Adult Category Learning
Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is able to account for the emergence of infants' sensitivity to correlated attributes (e.g., has wings and…
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Common Mechanisms in Infant and Adult Category Learning
Computational models of infant categorization often fail to elaborate the transitional mechanisms that allow infants to achieve adult performance. In this article, we apply a successful connectionist model of adult category learning to developmental data. The Supervised and Unsupervised Stratified Adaptive Incremental Network (SUSTAIN) model is able to account for the emergence of infants' sensitivity to correlated attributes (e.g., has wings and…
Thinking in groups
Is cognition an exclusive property of the individual or can groups have a mind of their own? We explore this question from the perspective of complex adaptive systems. One of the principal insights from this line of work is that rules that govern behavior at one level of analysis (the individual) can cause qualitatively different behavior at higher levels (the group). We review a number of behavioral studies from our lab that demonstrate how grou…
Evaluating Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a Tool for Experimental Behavioral Research
Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online crowdsourcing service where anonymous online workers complete web-based tasks for small sums of money. The service has attracted attention from experimental psychologists interested in gathering human subject data more efficiently. However, relative to traditional laboratory studies, many aspects of the testing environment are not under the experimenter's control. In this paper, we attempt to empirically …
Expectations about future learning influence moment-to-moment feelings of suspense
Suspense is a cognitive and affective state that is often experienced in the anticipation of information and contributes to the enjoyment and consumption of entertainment such as movies or sports. Ely et al. proposed a formal definition of suspense which relies upon predictions about future belief updates. In order to empirically evaluate this theory, we designed a task based on the casino card game Blackjack where a variety of suspense dynamics …
Limits on simulation approaches in intuitive physics
Children’s failure to control variables may reflect adaptive decision-making
Changing one variable at a time while controlling others is a key aspect of scientific experimentation and a central component of STEM curricula. However, children reportedly struggle to learn and implement this strategy. Why do children’s intuitions about how best to intervene on a causal system conflict with scientific practices? Mathematical analyses have shown that controlling variables is not always the most efficient learning strategy, and …
Seeking New Information With Old Questions: Children and Adults Reuse and Recombine Concepts From Prior Questions
Question asking is a key tool for learning about the world, especially in childhood. However, formulating good questions is challenging. In any given situation, many questions are possible but only few are informative. In the present work, we investigate two ways 5- to 10-year-olds and adults simplify the challenge of formulating questions: by reusing previous questions, and by recombining components of previous questions to form new questions. I…
Computer Science (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Cognitive psychology (6 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Cognition (5 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (4 works) · Cognitive science (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Cognitive Science and Education Research (2 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (2 works)