Teleological generics.

Certain "generic" generalizations concern functions and purposes, e.g., cars are for driving. Some functional properties yield unacceptable teleological generics: for instance, cars are for parking seems false even though people park cars as often as they drive them. No theory of teleology in philosophy or psychology can explain what makes teleological generics acceptable. However, a recent theory (Prasada, 2017; Prasada & Dillingham, 2006; Prasada, Khemlani, Leslie, & Glucksberg, 2013) argues that a certain type of mental representation - a "principled" connection between a kind and a property - licenses generic generalizations. The account predicts that people should accept teleological generics that describe kinds and properties linked by a principled connection. Under the analysis, car bears a principled connection to driving (a car's primary purpose) and a non-principled connection to parking (an incidental consequence of driving). We report four experiments that tested and corroborated the theory's predictions, and we describe a regression analysis that rules out alternative accounts. We conclude by showing how the theory we developed can serve as the foundation for a general theory of teleological thinking.

Explanatory completeness.

All explanations are incomplete, but reasoners think some explanations are more complete than others. To explain this behavior, we propose a novel theory of how people assess explanatory incompleteness. The account assumes that reasoners represent explanations as causal mental models - iconic representations of possible arrangements of causes and effects. A complete explanation refers to a single integrated model, whereas an incomplete explanation refers to multiple models. The theory predicts that if there exists an unspecified causal relation - a gap - anywhere within an explanation, reasoners must maintain multiple models to handle the gap. They should treat such explanations as less complete than those without a gap. Four experiments provided participants with causal descriptions, some of which yield one explanatory model, e.g., A causes B and B causes C, and some of which demand multiple models, e.g., A causes X and B causes C. Participants across the studies preferred one-model descriptions to multiple-model ones on tasks that implicitly and explicitly required them to assess explanatory completeness. The studies corroborate the theory. They are the first to reveal the mental processes that underlie the assessment of explanatory completeness. We conclude by reviewing the theory in light of extant accounts of causal reasoning.

Prior Knowledge, Episodic Control and Theory of Mind in Autism: Toward an Integrative Account of Social Cognition.

Over the last 30 years, research has explored theory of mind (ToM), the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and to others. Work on ToM in typical and atypical populations has shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social understanding and interaction. The ToM hypothesis has long been regarded as one comprehensive explanation of the severe cognitive and behavioral impairments encountered by individuals with autism. However, high-functioning individuals can often pass both first-order and second-order false belief tasks using cognitive compensation strategies. To provide more sensitive measures of mental state attribution abilities, researchers have introduced more difficult, "advanced" theory of mind tasks. In this article, we argue that in attempting to bypass compensation strategies, these new advanced ToM tasks, such as the Faux Pas and the Strange Stories tasks, impose cognitive demands beyond those specific to the domain of ToM. We then provide an integrative account of social deficits in autism that takes into account several distinct components of mental state understanding, including both general cognitive capacities and processes specific to ToM. We argue that a number of related cognitive abilities, including episodic cognitive control and inferencing from prior knowledge, are necessary to understand how both people with autism and typical development navigate challenging, real-life social situations.

Grasping for Traits or Reasons? How People Grapple With Puzzling Social Behaviors.

Within social psychology, it is well accepted that trait inference is the dominant tool for understanding others' behavior. Outside of social psychology, a different consensus has emerged, namely, that people predominantly explain behavior in terms of mental states. Both positions are based on limited evidence. The trait literature focuses on trait ascriptions to persons, not explanations of behavior. The mental state literature focuses on explanations of ordinary behaviors (for which social scripts provide mental states), not of expectancy-violating behaviors. We examined the critical test case for the two opposing positions: explanations of expectancy-violating behaviors. Participants provided open-ended explanations of puzzling actions, which were content-analyzed for use of mental states, traits, and other causal background factors. Across four studies, three stimulus sets, and two subpopulations, people overwhelmingly offered mental states when explaining puzzling actions (compared with ordinary actions), while they struggled to generate traits and other background factors.

The social life of cognition.

We begin by illustrating that long before the cognitive revolution, social psychology focused on topics pertaining to what is now known as social cognition: people's subjective interpretations of social situations and the concepts and cognitive processes underlying these interpretations. We then examine two questions: whether social cognition entails characteristic concepts and cognitive processes, and how social processes might themselves shape and constrain cognition. We suggest that social cognition relies heavily on generic cognition but also on unique concepts (e.g., agent, intentionality) and unique processes (e.g., projection, imitation, joint attention). We further suggest that social processes play a prominent role in the development and unfolding of several generic cognitive processes, including learning, attention, and memory. Finally, we comment on the prospects of a recently developing approach to the study of social cognition (social neuroscience) and two potential future directions (computational social cognition and social-cognitive robotics).