Moira Dillon

About

Moira Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University, where she has been serving since 2017. Her research focuses on infants’ and children’s precocious knowledge about the world, including objects, places, people, and animals, and how this knowledge derives from our evolutionary inheritance. She investigates how this foundational knowledge forms the basis of human cultural and intellectual achievements. Dillon employs cognitive, developmental, and computational approaches in her research, aiming to gain insight into the origin and development of human cognition. Her work involves active collaborations with economists, mathematicians, neuroscientists, educators, and humanists, and she maintains research partnerships with organizations such as The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), Lookit (an online infant and child lab), and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Dillon’s expertise in human common sense is also used to improve machine common sense, with the goal of creating AI systems that better understand humans and that humans can better understand. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. from Harvard University obtained in 2017 and a B.A. from Yale University earned in 2008.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Political Science
• Cognitive science
• Developmental psychology
• Neuroscience
• Epistemology
• Database

Selected publications

• Commonsense psychology in human infants and machines

  Cognition · 2023 · 23 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Human infants are fascinated by other people. They bring to this fascination a constellation of rich and flexible expectations about the intentions motivating people's actions. Here we test 11-month-old infants and state-of-the-art learning-driven neural-network models on the "Baby Intuitions Benchmark (BIB)," a suite of tasks challenging both infants and machines to make high-level predictions about the underlying causes of agents' actions. Infants expected agents' actions to be directed toward…

  DOI

• Baby Intuitions Benchmark (BIB): Discerning the goals, preferences, and\n actions of others

  arXiv (Cornell University) · 2021 · 16 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  To achieve human-like common sense about everyday life, machine learning\nsystems must understand and reason about the goals, preferences, and actions of\nother agents in the environment. By the end of their first year of life, human\ninfants intuitively achieve such common sense, and these cognitive achievements\nlay the foundation for humans' rich and complex understanding of the mental\nstates of others. Can machines achieve generalizable, commonsense reasoning\nabout other agents like human…

  DOI

• Divisive language

  Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What language devises, it might divide. By exploring the relations among the core geometries of the physical world, the abstract geometry of Euclid, and language, I give new insight into both the persistence of core knowledge into adulthood and our access to it through language. My extension of Spelke's language argument has implications for pedagogy, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.

  PublisherDOI

• 15‐Month‐Olds’ Understanding of Imitation in Social and Instrumental Contexts

  Infancy · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  From early in development, humans use imitation to express social engagement, to understand social affiliations, and to learn from others. Nevertheless, the social and instrumental goals that drive imitation in everyday and pedagogical contexts are highly intertwined. What cues might infants use to infer that a social goal is driving imitation? Here we use minimal and tightly controlled visual displays to evaluate 15-month-olds' attribution of social goals to imitation. In particular, we ask whe…

  PublisherDOI

• Descriptions of phenomenal versus intentional mental states are differentially associated with gaze direction

  2025-04-02 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Across cultures, humans reason about others’ mental states as being either phenomenal, reflecting shareable experiences, or intentional, reflecting agentive goals. Might our dissociated judgments of others’ mental states be linked to dissociated judgments of others’ gaze direction, one of our earliest social cues from infancy? We presented adults (N = 600) and 6- to 8-year-old children (N = 200) with direct, definitional descriptions as well as descriptions of example phenomenal or intentional m…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Becoming Euclid: Characterizing the geometric intuitions that support formal learning in mathematics

  NSF · $1.8M · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth S. Spelke

  Harvard University

  42 shared

• Esther Duflo

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  24 shared

• Keesler Welch

  17 shared

• Joshua Dean

  University of Bristol

  17 shared

• Véronique Izard

  Université Paris Cité

  17 shared

• Harini Kannan

  16 shared

• Yuval Hart

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  10 shared

• Brenden M. Lake

  8 shared

Similar researchers at New York University

• David Hoggh-126
• Eero Simoncellih-113
• David Heegerh-95