Research

I am an Assistant Professor at Harvard's Department of Psychology. I head the Computation, Cognition, and Development lab, with a focus on intuitive theories and people's common-sense reasoning about physics and psychology. I'm also a member of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines.

Thesis

My thesis was on the nature and origin of intuitive theories, available here.

CV

A current CV can be found here.

Publications

• Bass, L., Smith, K, Bonawitz, E., and Ullman, T.D., (2022) Partial Mental Simulation Explains Fallacies in Physical Reasoning. Cognitive Neuropsychology. (paywall paper) (psyarxiv version)
• Gjata, N. N., Ullman, T. D., Spelke, E. S., and Liu, S. (2022). What could go wrong: adults and children calibrate predictions and explanations of others' actions based on relative reward and danger. Cognitive Science.
• Conwell, C., and Ullman, T.D., (2022). Testing Relational Understanding in Text-Guided Image Generation. arxiv.
• Gershman, S. and Ullman, T.D., (2022). Causal Implicatures from Correlational Statements. psyarxiv.
• Jonusaite, S. and Ullman, T.D., (2022). The Invisible Hand as an Intuitive Sociological Explanation. psyarxiv.
• Bridgers, S., Schulz, L.E., and Ullman, T.D. (2021). Loopholes, a Window into Value Alignment and the Learning of Meaning. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Mao, J., Luo, Z., Gan, C., Tenenbaum, J.B., Wu, J.,Kaelbling, J.P., and Ullman, T.D. (2021). Temporal and Object Quantification Networks. Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
• Sosa, F. A., Ullman, T., Tenenbaum, J. B., Gershman, S. J., & Gerstenberg, T. (2021). Moral dynamics: Grounding moral judgment in intuitive physics and intuitive psychology. Cognition.
• Ullman, T. D. (2021). What are you talking about? Nature Human Behaviour.
• Shu, T., Bhandwaldar, A., Gan, C., Smith, K.A., Liu, S., Gutfreund, D., Spelke, E., Tenenbaum, J.B. and Ullman, T.D. (2021). AGENT: A Benchmark for Core Psychological Reasoning. Thirty-eighth International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
• Du, Y., Smith, K., Ullman, T.D., Tenenebaum, J.B., and Wu, J. (2021). Unsupervised Discovery of 3D Physical Objects From Video. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
• Kryven, M., Ullman, T.D., Cowan, W., and Tenenbaum, J.B., (2021) Plans or Outcomes: How do we attribute intelligence to others? Cognitive Science.
• Ullman, T. D., and Tenenbaum, J. B. (2020). Bayesian Models of Conceptual Development: Learning as Building Models of the World. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. (paywall paper) (free psyarxiv version)
• Zimmerman, S, and Ullman, T.D. (2020) Models of Transformative Decision Making, in Transformative Experience: New Philosophical Essays, eds. Enoch Lambert and John Schwenkler, Oxford University Press. (accepted manuscript) (link to book).
• Smith, K. A., Mei, L., Yao, S., Wu, J., Spelke, E., Tenenbaum, J. B., and Ullman, T. D. (2020). The fine structure of surprise in intuitive physics: when, why, and how much?. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Ullman, T.D. (2020) Heroes of our own story: Self-image and rationalizing in thought experiments. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43 (2020) (accepted manuscript) (link to paper).
• McCoy, J. and Ullman, T. (2019) Transformative Decisions and Their Discontents. Part of a symposium on L.A. Paul's "Transformative Experience". Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia, 10(3), 339 - 345.
• Smith, K.*, Mei, L.*, Yao, S., Wu, J., Spelke, E., Tenenbaum, J.B., and Ullman, T.D., (2019) Modeling expectation violation in intuitive physics with coarse probabilistic object representations. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (project page)
• Bonawitz E., Ullman, T.D., Gopnik, A. and Tenenbaum, J.B. (2019), Sticking to the evidence? A Computational and behavioral case Study of micro-theory change in the domain of magnetism. Cognitive Science.
• McCoy, J.P., and Ullman, T.D. (2019), Judgments of effort for magical violations of intuitive physics. PLOS ONE (osf)
• McCoy, J.P.*, Paul, LA*, and Ullman, T.D.* (2019), Modal Prospection. Metaphysics and Cognitive Science, eds. Alvin Goldman and Brian McLaughlin. Oxford University Press (US)
• McCoy, J.P., and Ullman, T.D. (2018), A Minimal Turing Test. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (osf)
• Gerstenberg, T., Ullman, T.D., Nagel, J., Kleiman-Weiner, M., Lagnado, D., and Tenenbaum, J.B. (2018), Lucky or clever? From changed expectations to attributions of responsibility. Cognition.
• Ullman, T. D., Spelke, E.S., Battaglia, P. and Tenenbaum, J.B. (2017), Mind Games: Game Engines as an Architecture for Intuitive Physics. Trends in Cognitive Science (accepted manuscript) (link to paper)
• Liu, S., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J.B., and Spelke, E.S., (2017), Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions. Science (preprint) (osf)
• Ullman, T. D., Stuhlmüller, A., Goodman, N.D. and Tenenbaum, J.B. (2017), Learning physical parameters from dynamic scenes. Cognitive Psychology
• Ullman, T. D., Alonso-Diaz, S., Ferringo, S., Zahid, S. and Kidd, C. (2017), Weight matters: The role of physical weight in non-physical language across age and culture. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
• Chang, M. B., Ullman, T. D., Torralba, A., and Tenenbaum, J. B. (2017), A compositional object-based approach to learning physical dynamics. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
• Liu, S., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., and Spelke, E. S. (2017). What’s worth the effort: Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
• Kryven, M., Ullman, T. D., Cowan, W., and Tenenbaum, J. B. (2017). Thinking and guessing: Bayesian and empirical models of how humans search. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
• Lake, B. M., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B., and Gershman, S. J. (2016), Building machines that learn and think like people. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
• T. D. Ullman, Y. Xu and N. D. Goodman (2016), The Pragmatics of Spatial Language. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• M. Kryven, T. D. Ullman, W. Cowan and J. B. Tenenbaum (2016), Outcome or Strategy? A Bayesian Model of Intelligence Attribution. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• T. D. Ullman, M. Siegel, J. B. Tenenbaum and S. J. Gershman (2016), Coalescing the vapors of human experience into a viable and meaningful comprehension Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• T. Gerstenberg, T. D. Ullman, M. Kleiman-Weiner, D. A. Lagnado and J. B. Tenenbaum (2014), Wins above replacement: Responsibility attributions as counterfactual replacements. Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science society.
• T. D. Ullman, A. Stuhlmüller, N. D. Goodman, J. B. Tenenbaum (2014), Learning physics from dynamical scenes. Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science society.
• J. K. Hamlin, T. D. Ullman, J. B. Tenenbaum, N. D. Goodman and C. L. Baker (2013), The mentalistic basis of core social cognition: Experiments in preverbal infants and a computational model. Developmental Science.
• E. B. Bonawitz, T. D. Ullman, A. Gopnik and J. B. Tenenbaum (2012), Sticking to the evidence? A computational and behavioral case study of micro-theory change in the domain of magnetism. ICDL (best paper award: experiment combined with computational model).
• T. D. Ullman, N. D. Goodman and J. B. Tenenbaum (2012), Theory learning as stochastic search in the language of thought. Cognitive Development.
• T. D. Ullman*, J. M. McCoy*, A. Stuhlmüller, T. Gerstenberg and J. B. Tenenbaum (2012), Why blame Bob? Probabilistic generative models, counterfactual reasoning, and blame attribution. Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science society.
• N. D. Goodman, T. D. Ullman, and J. B. Tenenbaum (2011), Learning a theory of causality. Psychological Review.
• T. D. Ullman, N. D. Goodman and J. B. Tenenbaum (2010), Theory acquisition as stochastic search: Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• T. D. Ullman, C. L. Baker, O. Macindoe, O. Evans, N. D. Goodman and J. B. Tenenbaum (2010), Help or hinder: Bayesian models of social goal inference. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (Vol. 22, pp. 1874-1882).
• N. D. Goodman, T. D. Ullman, and J. B. Tenenbaum (2009), Learning a theory of causality. Proceedings of the Thirty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.