Tomer D Ullman
Biographic Data
| ID | 1801902 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tomer D Ullman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tomer D |
| FAMILY NAME | Ullman |
| SIGNATURE | ULLMAN T D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1722-2382 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
People make graded judgments about the inconceivable
Some impossible things are more impossible than others. Magically levitating a feather is easier than levitating a rock, even though both are impossible in the real world. But within the things that are inconceivable-e.g., "the concept of red writing a play" or "a girl being a prime number"-are some things more inconceivable than others? We first established that people have graded, systematic judgments about the likelihood of inconceivable event…
Shape Guides Visual Pretense
People often imagine everyday objects are something else. A turned over bottle becomes a car, a teapot becomes a swan. Such pretense is common in play, pedagogy, and narratives. The relationship between a real and pretend object is flexible, but not arbitrary. In this work, we used a behavioral and computational approach that compares people and performant multi-modal vision models to study the features that guide the construction of visual prete…
People Evaluate Agents Based on the Algorithms That Drive Their Behavior
When people see an agent perform a task, do they care if the underlying algorithm driving it is ‘intelligent’ or not? More generally, when people intuitively evaluate the performance of others, do they value external performance metrics (intuitive behaviorism) or do they also take into account the underlying algorithm driving the agent’s behavior (intuitive cognitivism)? We propose 3 dimensions for examining this distinction: Action Efficiency, R…
Loopholes: A window into value alignment and the communication of meaning
Shades of zero: Distinguishing impossibility from inconceivability
Fun isn't easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” versus “playing to win”
Play is important in many cultures and species, but the basic motivations behind play remain unclear. In two preregistered experiments, we examined what 5- to 10-year-old children ( n = 124) think makes play rewarding under internally and externally motivated contexts using a novel game design task. We specifically compared children's choices about how to best configure a novel tossing game when either playing for fun or playing to win . We found…
Learning Loopholes: The Development of Intentional Misunderstandings in Children
What do children do when they do not want to obey but cannot afford to disobey? Might they, like adults, feign misunderstanding and seek out loopholes? Across four studies (N = 723; 44% female; USA; majority White; data collected 2020–2023), we find that loophole behavior emerges around ages 5 to 6 (Study 1, 3–18 years), that children think loopholes will get them into less trouble than non-compliance (Study 2, 4–10 years), predict that other chi…
Electrophysiology Reveals That Intuitive Physics Guides Visual Tracking and Working Memory
Starting in early infancy, our perception and predictions are rooted in strong expectations about the behavior of everyday objects. These intuitive physics expectations have been demonstrated in numerous behavioral experiments, showing that even pre-verbal infants are surprised when something impossible happens (e.g., when objects magically appear or disappear). However, it remains unclear whether and how physical expectations shape different asp…
Ambivalence by design: A computational account of loopholes
The detection of automatic behavior in other people
The standard model of theory of mind posits that we attribute mental states to other people to explain their behavior. However, what of cases in which we think the other person is being scripted, acting automatically with no goals or beliefs to recover? While a great deal of past work has distinguished between automatic and reflective behaviors in one's own decision making, here we argue that reasoning about automatic behavior in other people is …
What is “Where”: Physical Reasoning Informs Object Location
A central puzzle the visual system tries to solve is: “what is where?” While a great deal of research attempts to model object recognition (“what”), a comparatively smaller body of work seeks to model object location (“where”), especially in perceiving everyday objects. How do people locate an object, right now, in front of them? In three experiments collecting over 35,000 judgements on stimuli spanning different levels of realism (line drawings,…
Non-commitment in mental imagery
The invisible hand as an intuitive sociological explanation
Self-orienting in human and machine learning
Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents’ Action Plans
Do infants appreciate that other people’s actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants (N = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals. Infants expected the agent to minimize the …
Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology
What are you talking about
A Minimal Turing Test
Building machines that learn and think like people
Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligen…
Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions
Ranking valuations on the basis of observed choices Obliged to make a choice between two goals, we evaluate the benefits of achieving the goals compared with the costs of the actions required before deciding what to do. This seems perfectly straightforward, and it is unsurprising to learn that we can also apply this reasoning to others; that is, someone that we see choosing a goal that requires a more costly action must value that goal more highl…
No prominent works on this page.
Building machines that learn and think like people
Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats that of humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligen…
Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions
Ranking valuations on the basis of observed choices Obliged to make a choice between two goals, we evaluate the benefits of achieving the goals compared with the costs of the actions required before deciding what to do. This seems perfectly straightforward, and it is unsurprising to learn that we can also apply this reasoning to others; that is, someone that we see choosing a goal that requires a more costly action must value that goal more highl…
A Minimal Turing Test
Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology
What are you talking about
Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents’ Action Plans
Do infants appreciate that other people’s actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants (N = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals. Infants expected the agent to minimize the …
What is “Where”: Physical Reasoning Informs Object Location
A central puzzle the visual system tries to solve is: “what is where?” While a great deal of research attempts to model object recognition (“what”), a comparatively smaller body of work seeks to model object location (“where”), especially in perceiving everyday objects. How do people locate an object, right now, in front of them? In three experiments collecting over 35,000 judgements on stimuli spanning different levels of realism (line drawings,…
Non-commitment in mental imagery
The invisible hand as an intuitive sociological explanation
Self-orienting in human and machine learning
Electrophysiology Reveals That Intuitive Physics Guides Visual Tracking and Working Memory
Starting in early infancy, our perception and predictions are rooted in strong expectations about the behavior of everyday objects. These intuitive physics expectations have been demonstrated in numerous behavioral experiments, showing that even pre-verbal infants are surprised when something impossible happens (e.g., when objects magically appear or disappear). However, it remains unclear whether and how physical expectations shape different asp…
Ambivalence by design: A computational account of loopholes
The detection of automatic behavior in other people
The standard model of theory of mind posits that we attribute mental states to other people to explain their behavior. However, what of cases in which we think the other person is being scripted, acting automatically with no goals or beliefs to recover? While a great deal of past work has distinguished between automatic and reflective behaviors in one's own decision making, here we argue that reasoning about automatic behavior in other people is …
Shape Guides Visual Pretense
People often imagine everyday objects are something else. A turned over bottle becomes a car, a teapot becomes a swan. Such pretense is common in play, pedagogy, and narratives. The relationship between a real and pretend object is flexible, but not arbitrary. In this work, we used a behavioral and computational approach that compares people and performant multi-modal vision models to study the features that guide the construction of visual prete…
People Evaluate Agents Based on the Algorithms That Drive Their Behavior
When people see an agent perform a task, do they care if the underlying algorithm driving it is ‘intelligent’ or not? More generally, when people intuitively evaluate the performance of others, do they value external performance metrics (intuitive behaviorism) or do they also take into account the underlying algorithm driving the agent’s behavior (intuitive cognitivism)? We propose 3 dimensions for examining this distinction: Action Efficiency, R…
Loopholes: A window into value alignment and the communication of meaning
Shades of zero: Distinguishing impossibility from inconceivability
Fun isn't easy: Children selectively manipulate task difficulty when “playing for fun” versus “playing to win”
Play is important in many cultures and species, but the basic motivations behind play remain unclear. In two preregistered experiments, we examined what 5- to 10-year-old children ( n = 124) think makes play rewarding under internally and externally motivated contexts using a novel game design task. We specifically compared children's choices about how to best configure a novel tossing game when either playing for fun or playing to win . We found…
Learning Loopholes: The Development of Intentional Misunderstandings in Children
What do children do when they do not want to obey but cannot afford to disobey? Might they, like adults, feign misunderstanding and seek out loopholes? Across four studies (N = 723; 44% female; USA; majority White; data collected 2020–2023), we find that loophole behavior emerges around ages 5 to 6 (Study 1, 3–18 years), that children think loopholes will get them into less trouble than non-compliance (Study 2, 4–10 years), predict that other chi…
People make graded judgments about the inconceivable
Some impossible things are more impossible than others. Magically levitating a feather is easier than levitating a rock, even though both are impossible in the real world. But within the things that are inconceivable-e.g., "the concept of red writing a play" or "a girl being a prime number"-are some things more inconceivable than others? We first established that people have graded, systematic judgments about the likelihood of inconceivable event…
Psychology (15 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (6 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (5 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (5 works) · Cognition (5 works)