Olivier Mascaro
Biographic Data
| ID | 946444 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Olivier Mascaro |
| GIVEN NAMES | Olivier |
| FAMILY NAME | Mascaro |
| SIGNATURE | MASCARO O |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1120-5955 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Core Intuitions of Psychological Non-Contradiction: Infants Assume That Individual Agents Act and Communicate Coherently
Humans generally posit that contrary mental states are unlikely to co-exist within a single mind. We tested the early ontogeny of this assumption in two domains: action and communication. Studies 1A and 1B tested whether 9-month-old infants assume that agents act coherently. Infants watched interactions between two hands whose owner(s) were invisible. In the contrary goals condition, the hand performed contrary actions—one hand reached for an obj…
Infants Assume Questions Serve an Information-Seeking Function, Link Them to Interrogative Sentences and Differentiate Them From Assertions
Eye-tracking studies tested the understanding of two types of speech acts (questions and assertions) in 14-, 18-, and 30-month-olds (N = 280; 149 females; ethnicity data collection forbidden, testing in 2021–2024). Experiments involved objects either hidden or visible for a speaker. By 14 months, when the speaker asked questions, infants focused on hidden objects (rs > 0.31). Infants linked novel labels in interrogative sentences to hidden object…
Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers’ Processing of Novel Communicative Cues
Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative cues tend to have low processing costs and high cognitive benefits. We tested this hypothesis in thr…
Human and animal dominance hierarchies show a pyramidal structure guiding adult and infant social inferences
How do we interpret questions? Simplified representations of knowledge guide humans' interpretation of information requests
Nonverbal rhetoric: 2- To 4-Year-Old Children Select Relevant Evidence When Trying to Influence Others
This article investigates the early emergence of reason-giving. Toddlers are sensitive to disagreements, and they can track several kinds of informational access, such as visual perception. We investigated whether young children use these skills (a) when assessing whether providing reasons is needed and (b) when selecting appropriate behaviors to support their claims. An experimenter disagreed with 2- to 4-year-old children (N = 71) about the loc…
Optimistic expectations about communication explain children's difficulties in hiding, lying, and mistrusting liars
We suggest that preschoolers’ frequent obliviousness to the risks and opportunities of deception comes from a trusting stance supporting verbal communication. Three studies ( N = 125) confirm this hypothesis. Three-year-olds can hide information from others (Study 1) and they can lie (Study 2) in simple settings. Yet when one introduces the possibility of informing others in the very same settings, three-year-olds tend to be honest (Studies 1 and…
Statistical treatment of looking-time data
Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is predicted. We analyzed data from 2 sources: an in-house set of LTs that included data from individua…
Early Understanding of Merit in Turkana Children
Fairness has been identified as a psychological adaptation to share the benefits of cooperation: unfair agents disproportionately favoring their own interests indeed decrease their chance of being recruited in future collaborations. Given the potential benefits of cooperation, it has been argued that fairness should become functional early in ontogeny as the child acquires more independence and expands her social network and collaborations. More …
Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods
Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same…
L'éveil du mensonge
Dès leur troisième année, les tout jeunes enfants manifestent des capacités cognitives qui devraient leur permettre de savoir mentir. Ils se représentent les croyances d'autrui, ils savent ce qu'est une représentation fausse de la réalité, et ils sont capables de manipuler autrui à l'aide de messages erronés. Malgré cela, il semble qu'ils soient avant tout des menteurs d'occasion, qui se saisissent des possibilités de tromper surtout lorsqu'ils y…
Epistemic Vigilance
Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and the…
The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deception
Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods
Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same…
Statistical treatment of looking-time data
Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is predicted. We analyzed data from 2 sources: an in-house set of LTs that included data from individua…
Human and animal dominance hierarchies show a pyramidal structure guiding adult and infant social inferences
Early Understanding of Merit in Turkana Children
Fairness has been identified as a psychological adaptation to share the benefits of cooperation: unfair agents disproportionately favoring their own interests indeed decrease their chance of being recruited in future collaborations. Given the potential benefits of cooperation, it has been argued that fairness should become functional early in ontogeny as the child acquires more independence and expands her social network and collaborations. More …
The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deception
Epistemic Vigilance
Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and the…
L'éveil du mensonge
Dès leur troisième année, les tout jeunes enfants manifestent des capacités cognitives qui devraient leur permettre de savoir mentir. Ils se représentent les croyances d'autrui, ils savent ce qu'est une représentation fausse de la réalité, et ils sont capables de manipuler autrui à l'aide de messages erronés. Malgré cela, il semble qu'ils soient avant tout des menteurs d'occasion, qui se saisissent des possibilités de tromper surtout lorsqu'ils y…
Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods
Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same…
Early Understanding of Merit in Turkana Children
Fairness has been identified as a psychological adaptation to share the benefits of cooperation: unfair agents disproportionately favoring their own interests indeed decrease their chance of being recruited in future collaborations. Given the potential benefits of cooperation, it has been argued that fairness should become functional early in ontogeny as the child acquires more independence and expands her social network and collaborations. More …
Statistical treatment of looking-time data
Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is predicted. We analyzed data from 2 sources: an in-house set of LTs that included data from individua…
Optimistic expectations about communication explain children's difficulties in hiding, lying, and mistrusting liars
We suggest that preschoolers’ frequent obliviousness to the risks and opportunities of deception comes from a trusting stance supporting verbal communication. Three studies ( N = 125) confirm this hypothesis. Three-year-olds can hide information from others (Study 1) and they can lie (Study 2) in simple settings. Yet when one introduces the possibility of informing others in the very same settings, three-year-olds tend to be honest (Studies 1 and…
Nonverbal rhetoric: 2- To 4-Year-Old Children Select Relevant Evidence When Trying to Influence Others
This article investigates the early emergence of reason-giving. Toddlers are sensitive to disagreements, and they can track several kinds of informational access, such as visual perception. We investigated whether young children use these skills (a) when assessing whether providing reasons is needed and (b) when selecting appropriate behaviors to support their claims. An experimenter disagreed with 2- to 4-year-old children (N = 71) about the loc…
How do we interpret questions? Simplified representations of knowledge guide humans' interpretation of information requests
Expectations of Processing Ease, Informativeness, and Accuracy Guide Toddlers’ Processing of Novel Communicative Cues
Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative cues tend to have low processing costs and high cognitive benefits. We tested this hypothesis in thr…
Human and animal dominance hierarchies show a pyramidal structure guiding adult and infant social inferences
Infants Assume Questions Serve an Information-Seeking Function, Link Them to Interrogative Sentences and Differentiate Them From Assertions
Eye-tracking studies tested the understanding of two types of speech acts (questions and assertions) in 14-, 18-, and 30-month-olds (N = 280; 149 females; ethnicity data collection forbidden, testing in 2021–2024). Experiments involved objects either hidden or visible for a speaker. By 14 months, when the speaker asked questions, infants focused on hidden objects (rs > 0.31). Infants linked novel labels in interrogative sentences to hidden object…
Core Intuitions of Psychological Non-Contradiction: Infants Assume That Individual Agents Act and Communicate Coherently
Humans generally posit that contrary mental states are unlikely to co-exist within a single mind. We tested the early ontogeny of this assumption in two domains: action and communication. Studies 1A and 1B tested whether 9-month-old infants assume that agents act coherently. Infants watched interactions between two hands whose owner(s) were invisible. In the contrary goals condition, the hand performed contrary actions—one hand reached for an obj…
Child and Animal Learning Development (12 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Cognition (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Developmental psychology (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Language Development and Disorders (3 works) · Social Psychology (3 works)