About

Hyowon Gweon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University and a leader of the Social Learning Lab. Her research broadly investigates how humans learn from others and facilitate learning in others, focusing on what makes human social learning so powerful, smart, and distinctive. She employs an interdisciplinary approach that combines developmental, computational, and neuroimaging methods to explain the cognitive underpinnings of human learning, communication, and prosocial behaviors. Gweon received her PhD in Cognitive Science from MIT in 2012, where she continued as a post-doctoral researcher before joining Stanford in 2014. Her academic appointments include being the Director of Graduate Studies in the Symbolic Systems Program (on leave for Autumn 2024-25), and she is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). She is a member of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. Her honors and awards include the Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar (2020), David Huntington Dean's Faculty Scholar (2019), CDS Steve Reznick Early Career Award (2022), APS Janet Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions (2020), Jacobs Early Career Fellowship (2020), James S. McDonnell Scholar Award for Human Cognition (2018), APA Dissertation Award (2014), and the Marr Prize for best student paper at the Cognitive Science Society (2010). Her research aims to explain the cognitive mechanisms underlying social learning, communication, and prosocial behaviors through an interdisciplinary lens.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Data science
• Cognitive science
• World Wide Web
• Social psychology
• Human–computer interaction
• Applied psychology
• Pedagogy
• Programming language
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Neuroscience

Selected publications

• Dropping things: Probing counterfactual thinking without counterfactual language

  2026-02-27

  articleOpen access

  A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to think about how things could have gone differently. Such counterfactual thinking underlies causal, social, and moral judgments. However, our understanding of how counterfactual thinking develops has been limited in at least two ways. First, many tasks rely on counterfactual language which may be difficult for young children to understand. Second, in most tasks, children can succeed without using genuine counterfactual thinking. We present a novel task that probes genuine counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language. Data from both children (N = 480) and adults (N = 90) in the U.S. across three versions of the task suggest that genuine counterfactual thinking emerges around five years of age.

  PublisherDOI

• Children's understanding of how noise disrupts verbal communication

  Child Development · 2026-01-14

  articleSenior author

  An abstract understanding of communication should support reasoning about both its success and failure: why it fails, what happens as a consequence, and how to fix it. Auditory noise frequently corrupts verbal communication, but little is known about how humans come to reason about it. The current work explored American 3- to 5-year-olds' third-party reasoning (Experiment 1, N = 168, 95 female) and communicative behaviors (Experiment 2, N = 48, 23 female) in noisy environments between 2021 and 2024. Children understood that auditory noise impedes others' hearing and prevents knowledge transmission, and they modified their own communication by gesturing more when their partner could not hear. Thus, even young children understand how noise disrupts communication and can communicate effectively in its presence.

  PublisherDOI

• Young children use mental simulation to reason about their performance

  2026-05-19

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Young children can use observed performance outcomes (e.g., successes and failures) to decide when to persist and which tasks to pursue. However, learners often face situations where outcomes either cannot be observed or are uninformative. Using a simple tablet game, we asked whether preschool-aged children can use mentally simulated outcomes to guide their decisions. In Experiment 1, the game froze mid-trial so the final outcome was unavailable. Children preferred to repeat the same game when their attempt would have resulted in success (versus failure). In Experiment 2, an on-screen agent intervened mid-trial, rendering the outcome uninformative about the child's performance. Children preferred to play the game without (versus with) the agent when their attempts would have been successful without the agent's intervention. These findings suggest that children can simulate alternative outcomes of their actions and use them to guide how they pursue future tasks.

  PublisherDOI

• Social Interest as the First Step towards Social Interaction: Investigating Age-Based Attentional Preferences to Family Photographs

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-02-09

  otherOpen accessSenior author
  Publisher

• Young children use mental simulation to reason about their performance

  PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-05-18

  preprintOpen access

  Young children can use observed performance outcomes (e.g., successes and failures) to decide when to persist and which tasks to pursue. However, learners often face situations where outcomes either cannot be observed or are uninformative. Using a simple tablet game, we asked whether preschool-aged children can use mentally simulated outcomes to guide their decisions. In Experiment 1, the game froze mid-trial so the final outcome was unavailable. Children preferred to repeat the same game when their attempt would have resulted in success (versus failure). In Experiment 2, an on-screen agent intervened mid-trial, rendering the outcome uninformative about the child's performance. Children preferred to play the game without (versus with) the agent when their attempts would have been successful without the agent's intervention. These findings suggest that children can simulate alternative outcomes of their actions and use them to guide how they pursue future tasks.

  Publisher

• Young children understand how social connections affect what people know about each other

  2025-07-30 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  An unwritten expectation in our everyday social interactions is that inti-mate personal information about someone—“insider knowledge”—is usuallyconfined within close relationships. For example, it would be odd, or evenunsettling, if a stranger knew about your favorite movie. Such expectationsabout who knows what about whom is a cornerstone of complex social behav-ior that reflects a rich understanding of how social connections shape whatpeople know about each other. Drawing on parental report (Study 1) as wellas a novel experimental approach using controlled but naturalistic conversa-tions (Study 2 & 3), here we demonstrate that 4- to 5-year-old children canrapidly infer who has insider knowledge about people. Children reported be-ing surprised when someone possessed personal knowledge misaligned withtheir relationships, such as a stranger knowing their favorite food or theirown parent knowing a stranger’s favorite movie. Children could also explainhow someone might have acquired that knowledge, either through first-handobservation or second-hand sources. These findings not only demonstratean early-emerging understanding of how individual minds are shaped in thecontext of their relationships and social networks, but also a remarkablyprecocious ability to deploy such understanding in real-time interactions todetect and explain anomalies in what people know about each other.

  PublisherDOI

• Young children infer the informativeness of others’ praise.

  Developmental Psychology · 2025-10-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Praise is not only rewarding but also informative. It can provide children with information about their competence, especially when they are uncertain or unable to judge for themselves. Not all praise is equally meaningful, however: someone who praises only high-quality work is more informative than someone who praises indiscriminately. Across four experiments, we find that 4- to 5-year-old U.S. children-from both in-person preschool and online samples-can infer the informativeness of others' praise based on the statistical dependence between praise and the quality of work evaluated. Participants were more likely to endorse praise from a teacher whose previous praise covaried with the quality of work over a teacher who praised indiscriminately or a teacher who praised only lower quality work (Experiment 1). Although children did not show a preference between teachers when seeking out praise for themselves (Experiment 2), they sought out praise from different teachers on behalf of another learner depending on the learner's goal (Experiments 3-4). Collectively, these findings show that even young children understand that praise is more than just positive reinforcement. Rather, they can reason about a speaker's inferred informativeness and use this to guide whose praise to seek out and endorse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• When Success Is Surprising: Children’s Ability to Use Surprise to Infer Competence

  Open Mind · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract How do we learn who is good at what? Building on the idea that humans draw rich inferences from others’ emotional expressions, here we ask whether others’ surprised reactions to performance outcomes can elicit inferences about competence. Across three experiments, participants were asked to choose “who is better” in scenarios where two students performed identically on the same task but their teacher expressed surprise to only one of them. In Experiment 1 (n = 60, adults) and Experiment 2 (n = 90, 6- to 8-year-old children), participants’ responses were modulated by not only the students’ performance outcomes (success or failure) but also the teacher’s response to the outcomes (surprise or no surprise). Specifically, participants preferentially chose the student who did not elicit the teacher’s surprise as more competent when both students succeeded, but chose the student who elicited surprise when both failed. Experiment 3a (n = 150, 4- to 8-year-olds) replicated this pattern in 6- to 8-year-olds as a group—but not in 4- to 5-year-olds—with increasing robustness with age. Finally, this pattern was significantly reduced in Experiment 3b where the teacher’s surprise was directed at an irrelevant event rather than the student’s performance (n = 90, 6- to 8-year-olds). Taken together, these results suggest that even non-valenced emotional reactions to performance outcomes—being surprised at someone’s success or failure—can inform inferences about valenced qualities such as competence. More broadly, the current findings demonstrate that emotional expressions we observe in our daily lives can lead to nuanced yet consequential social judgments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Theory of Minds: Early Understanding of Interacting Minds

  Annual Review of Developmental Psychology · 2025-12-09 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The idea that we understand others’ actions in terms of their underlying mental states has shaped decades of developmental research on social cognition. Existing work, however, has primarily focused on reasoning about the minds of isolated individuals, leaving open questions about how we reason about the minds of interacting individuals. In fact, children routinely observe social interactions well before they themselves can interact with others; how do children make sense of these observations? We propose that humans, starting early in life, can extend their understanding of individual minds (Theory of Mind) to encompass the causal relationship between multiple agents’ minds and actions (Theory of Minds). We ground our proposal within existing computational frameworks that consider mental-state reasoning as a core component of action understanding, communication, and social learning. We then review empirical work that examines children's emerging understanding of interacting minds and discuss its development. We close by suggesting directions for future work toward a unified description of how humans make sense of their complex social environment.

  PublisherDOI

• Young children strategically adapt to unreliable social partners

  2025-11-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The effectiveness of social learning depends on whether learners receive help when they need it. In four preregistered studies, U.S. 4–6-year-olds (N = 244; 54% female, 27% White, 2% Black, 48% Asian, 9% Hispanic/Latino, 24% Multiracial/Other) interacted with an adult who either did or did not follow through on promised help. Experiment 1 tested the effect of reliable versus unreliable help on children’s future task choice; Experiment 2 examined its effect on children’s help-seeking and exploration of a novel toy. Children’s learning goals and strategies were modulated by the past reliability of help, suggesting that seemingly maladaptive decisions—such as avoiding a hard task—may be adaptive responses that balance the reliability of help against the utility of exploring alone.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Emotion as information: Young childrens use of others emotional expressions to guide their inference and exploration

  NSF · $600k · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Laura Schulz

  79 shared

• Patrick Shafto

  57 shared

• Mika Asaba

  Yale University

  33 shared

• Yang Wu

  University of Toronto

  17 shared

• Sophie Bridgers

  Harvard University

  16 shared

• Rebecca Saxe

  Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences

  16 shared

• Hilary Richardson

  University of Edinburgh

  15 shared

• Natalia Vélez

  Princeton University

  14 shared

Labs

• Social Learning LabPI

  Understanding the human ability to communicate, particularly how we learn from others and teach others.

Awards & honors

• Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar (2020)
• David Huntington Dean's Faculty Scholar (2019)
• CDS Steve Reznick Early Career Award (2022)
• APS Janet Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contr…
• Jacobs Early Career Fellowship (2020)