Stanford Psychology Podcast 169 - Tamar Kushnir: The Power of Imagination
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Feb 6, 2026 Tamar Kushnir, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke, studies cognitive development and imagination in children. The conversation explores how imagination supports memory, planning, moral judgment, and social thinking. It touches on counterfactuals, pretend play, mind‑wandering versus goal‑directed thought, creativity’s ties to knowledge, and imagination’s role in social change.
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Imagination Is Core To Thinking
- Imagination is the cognitive capacity to think about anything not in the here and now and underlies reasoning and meaning-making.
- Tamar Kushnir argues imagination constantly interacts with perception and is integral to thinking, not separate from it.
Make Imagination Experimentally Tractable
- To study imagination empirically, break it into tractable behaviors like pretend play, causal inference, or counterfactual reasoning.
- Kushnir's lab studies how imagining alternatives informs judgments of intentionality and moral reasoning.
Alternatives Reveal Intent
- Representing alternative possible actions (counterfactuals) helps us infer others' intentions and moral motives.
- Even infants use simple alternative expectations to judge whether an action was intentional.