Learning from others: children's construction of concepts

Food and nutrition security of adolescents and young adults NEETs and non-NEETs in two low socioeconomic urban settlements in South Africa

INTRODUCTION

Adolescents and young adults not yet in employment, education, or training (NEETs) account for a sizable fraction of the global population. In South Africa, 34.3% of young individuals aged 15 to 24 were classified as NEETs in 2022. Lack of work in low-income areas may lead to poverty and food insecurity, negatively impacting diet quality.

OBJECTIVE

This cross-sectional study aimed to evaluate and compare the anthropometric status, dietary intake, and food security of NEET and non-NEET adolescents and young adults (aged 18-24 years) in Langa and Fisantekraal, two low socioeconomic settlements in South Africa.

METHODS

Participants were recruited through door-to-door visits. Standardized instruments including a socio-demographic questionnaire, household hunger score, lived poverty index, anthropometric assessments, and 24-hour dietary recalls were used for data collection.

RESULTS

There were no significant differences in the prevalence of household hunger (p = 0.496), the lived poverty index (p = 0.111) and the prevalence of low micronutrient intakes between the NEETS and non-NEETs (p > 0.05). The prevalence of inadequate daily iron intake had the lowest prevalence while the prevalence of inadequate calcium intake was highest in this group of adolescents and young adults. The insufficient intake of micronutrients among adolescents and young adults can be attributed to the diets consumed by this demographic group.

Food Concepts Among Black and Hispanic Preschool-Age Children: A Preliminary Qualitative Descriptive Study Using Ethnographic Techniques and an Internet Conferencing Platform

Background/Objectives: Little is known about preschool-age children's food concepts among diverse populations. Grounded in the Theory of Mind and Naïve Biology, the primary aim of this study was to describe Black and Hispanic preschool-age children's food concepts. A secondary aim was to determine the feasibility of collecting data from preschool-age children via a video conferencing platform. Methods: Preliminary qualitative descriptive study. A purposive sample of nine 4- to 6-year-old children (x¯ age = 4.9; Black, n = 7; Hispanic, n = 2), mostly female (n = 7) participated. Children generated two free lists: foods they think of, and foods they eat, reported mouthfeel of 16 foods, and performed a constrained card sort with rationale. Results: All children were able to use the video conference platform. Foods that Black and Hispanic children frequently listed as thought of (x¯ = 6.75) included chicken, rice, carrots, and apples; those frequently listed as foods they eat (x¯ = 8.33) included pancakes and grapes. Black and Hispanic children used various lexicon such as warm, soft, crunchy, and "ouchy" to describe mouthfeel. All preschool-age children sorted foods into piles (range 4-20 piles). Younger children used discrete labels to categorize foods and created many piles while older children used broader labels and created fewer piles. Conclusions: This is the first study to add to the literature about Black and Hispanic preschool-age children's food concepts before receiving formal education about nutrition. Additionally, we highlight the novel and successful use of ethnographic techniques via internet video conferencing. Subtle differences in their experiential knowledge about food reflect culturally salient qualities that are critical to consider when developing interventions to promote healthy eating behavior.

Enhancing equine welfare: a qualitative study on the impact of RAiSE (Recognizing Affective States in Equine) as an educational tool

The horse industry's growing focus on improving horse welfare stems from stakeholders' desires, increasing public scrutiny, and potential threats to its Social License to Operate. Correctly assessing equine affective states is crucial for enhancing horse welfare. However, horse owners often struggle with this assessment, especially those with limited consistent access to horses. To address this gap, RAiSE (Recognizing Affective State in Equine) was developed as an educational tool aimed at improving horse industry participants' ability to recognize these states. After development of the educational tool, its effectiveness was assessed using an inductive qualitative approach to define themes and patterns. Interview responses were collected through open-ended questions and interviews, with thematic analysis revealing key improvements and challenges of online learning. Participants discussed feeling as if they had achieved improvements in their ability to assess affective states and expressed intent to alter their behavior. Important themes that emerged through the inductive analysis of open-ended questions included: awareness of horse's emotional state, comprehensive observation of horses' body language, interpreting equine senses, recognizing pain and its impact on equine behavior and well-being, and human influence on behavior and welfare. Interviews of ten users highlighted key themes regarding improvements needed with RAiSE, as well as the shared positive experiences throughout taking the online course. This study emphasizes the critical role of educational tools like RAiSE and the importance of their evaluation in advancing horse welfare by improving owners' awareness and understanding of equine emotions, thus enabling owners to make better decisions and management practices.

Maladaptive but malleable: Gender-science stereotypes emerge early but are modifiable by language

Gender-science stereotypes emerge early in childhood, but little is known about the developmental processes by which they arise. The present study tested the hypothesis that language implying scientists are a special and distinct kind of person contributes to the development of gender-science stereotypes, even when it does not communicate stereotypic content. One cross-sectional and two longitudinal studies with racially and geographically diverse children (primarily from the United States; ages 4-5; N = 872, tested 2020-2022) revealed that gender stereotypes about science versus art (a) emerge before elementary school, (b) arise from commonplace identity-emphasizing language, especially among girls, and (c) can be durably disrupted by subtle changes to language. This study identifies a promising way to counteract stereotypes at their roots.

What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary

Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, "concept" has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension). We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y).

Children weigh internet inaccuracy when trusting in online information

This study examined whether an internet source's history of inaccuracy influences children's epistemic trust in online information. Chinese children aged 4 to 8 years (N = 84; 41 girls and 43 boys) accessed information on their own from an image-based website, heard information from the internet that was relayed by an adult, or viewed a person in a video providing information without referring to the internet (in a baseline condition). After the internet source provided three obviously inaccurate statements, children significantly reduced their epistemic trust in the internet source regardless of whether they obtained the information through a direct interaction with the internet or it was relayed by an adult. Moreover, the extent of the reduction in trust was comparable to the baseline video condition. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that 4- to 8-year-old children take into account a history of inaccuracy and revise their beliefs in statements from the internet, just as they do when evaluating human informants.

Beyond words: Semantic satiation and the mental accessibility of the concept of suicide

Disrupting the accessibility of the mental representation of suicide may be a possible pathway to a strategy for suicide prevention. Our study aims to theoretically evaluate this perspective by examining the impact of temporarily disrupting the concept of suicide on perceptions of suicide. Using a within-subject design, we tested the effects of semantic satiation targeting the word "suicide" on the perceptual judgment of suicide-relevant pictures in 104 young adults. On each trial, participants repeated aloud one of the three words (i.e., "accident," "murder," or "suicide") either three times (priming) or 30 times (satiation) and indicated whether a subsequent picture matched with the word. Results indicated that satiation of the word "suicide" slowed the accurate categorization of pictures related to all three words, and satiation of "murder" and "accident" delayed participants' judgment of suicide-relevant pictures. Our findings support that semantic satiation can render the suicide concept temporarily less accessible, thereby providing preliminary support for the strategy of concept disruption in suicide prevention.

Infant neuroscience: how to measure brain activity in the youngest minds

The functional properties of the infant brain are poorly understood. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience are opening new avenues for measuring brain activity in human infants. These include novel uses of existing technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), the availability of newer technologies including functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and optically pumped magnetometry (OPM), and innovative applications of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in awake infants during cognitive tasks. In this review article we catalog these available non-invasive methods, discuss the challenges and opportunities encountered when applying them to human infants, and highlight the potential they may ultimately hold for advancing our understanding of the youngest minds.

Detecting lies through others' eyes: Children use perceptual access cues to evaluate listeners' beliefs about informants' deception

Children are often third-party observers of conversations between informants and receivers. Although 5- and 6-year-olds can identify and reject informants' false testimony, it remains unclear whether they expect others to do the same. Accurately assessing others' impressions of informants and their testimony in a conversational setting is essential for children's navigation of the social world. Using a novel second-order lie detection task, the current study examined whether 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 74; Mage = 69 months) take receivers' epistemic states into account when predicting whether a receiver would think an informant is truthful or deceptive. We pitted children's firsthand observations of reality against informants' false testimony while manipulating receivers' perceptual access to a sticker-hiding event. Results showed that when the receiver had perceptual access and was knowledgeable, children predicted that the receiver would think the informant is lying. Critically, when the receiver lacked perceptual access and was ignorant, children were significantly more likely to predict that the receiver would think the informant is telling the truth. Second-order theory of mind and executive function strengthened this effect. Findings are interpreted using a dual-process framework and provide new insights into children's understanding of others' selective trust and susceptibility to deception.

The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network

The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers. This study is being conducted in 39 distinct cultural-religious groups (to date), spanning 17 countries and 13 languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities, and present the final, English-language study materials for 6 of the 39 cultural-religious groups who are currently being recruited for this study: Protestant Americans, Catholic Americans, American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.

Music in the Middle: A Culture-Cognition-Mediator Model of Musical Functionality

Music is both universal, appearing in every known human culture, and culture-specific, often defying intelligibility across cultural boundaries. This duality has been the source of debate within the broad community of music researchers, and there have been significant disagreements both on the ontology of music as an object of study and the appropriate epistemology for that study. To help resolve this tension, I present a culture-cognition-mediator model that situates music as a mediator in the mutually constitutive cycle of cultures and selves representing the ways individuals both shape and are shaped by their cultural environments. This model draws on concepts of musical grammars and schema, contemporary theories in developmental and cultural psychology that blur the distinction between nature and nurture, and recent advances in cognitive neuroscience. Existing evidence of both directions of causality is presented, providing empirical support for the conceptual model. The epistemological consequences of this model are discussed, specifically with respect to transdisciplinarity, hybrid research methods, and several potential empirical applications and testable predictions as well as its import for broader ontological conversations around the evolutionary origins of music itself.

Parents' talk about conceptual categories with infants: stability, variability, and implications for expressive language development

Children's exposure to talk about conceptual categories plays a powerful role in shaping their conceptual development. However, it remains unclear when parents begin to talk about categories with young children and whether such talk relates to children's language skills. This study examines relations between parents' talk about conceptual categories and infants' expressive language development. Forty-seven parent-infant dyads were videotaped playing together at child age 10, 12, 14, and 16 months. Transcripts of interactions were analyzed to identify parents' talk about conceptual categories. Children's expressive language development was assessed at 18 months. Findings indicate that parents indeed talked about conceptual categories with infants and that talk was stable across time, with college-educated parents producing more than non-college-educated parents. Further, parents' talk about conceptual categories between 10 and 16 months predicted children's 18-month expressive language. This study sheds new light on mechanisms through which early experiences may support children's language development.

"It kinda has like a mind": Children's and parents' beliefs concerning viral disease transmission for COVID-19 and the common cold

How people reason about disease transmission is central to their commonsense theories, scientific literacy, and adherence to public health guidelines. This study provided an in-depth assessment of U.S. children's (ages 5-12, N = 180) and their parents' (N = 125) understanding of viral transmission of COVID-19 and the common cold, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The primary aim was to discover children's causal models of viral transmission, by asking them to predict and explain counter-intuitive outcomes (e.g., asymptomatic disease, symptom delay) and processes that cannot be directly observed (e.g., viral replication, how vaccines work). A secondary aim was to explore parental factors that might contribute to children's understanding. Although even the youngest children understood germs as disease-causing and were highly knowledgeable about certain behaviors that transmit or block viral disease (e.g., sneezing, mask-wearing), they generally failed to appreciate the processes that play out over time within the body. Overall, children appeared to rely on two competing mental models of viruses: one in which viruses operate strictly via mechanical processes (movement through space), and one in which viruses are small living creatures, able to grow in size and to move by themselves. These results suggest that distinct causal frameworks co-exist in children's understanding. A challenge for the future is how to teach children about illness as a biological process without also fostering inappropriate animism or anthropomorphism of viruses.

Expressions of uncertainty in invisible scientific and religious phenomena during naturalistic conversation

Across cultures, studies report more confidence in the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena, such as germs, as compared to unobservable religious phenomena, such as angels. We investigated a potential cultural mechanism for the transmission of confidence in the existence of invisible entities. Specifically, we asked whether parents in societies with markedly different religious profiles-Iran and China-signal differential confidence across the domains of science and religion during unmoderated conversations with their children (N = 120 parent-child dyads in total; 5- to 11-year-olds). The results revealed that parents used fewer lexical cues to uncertainty when discussing scientific phenomena, as compared to religious phenomena. Unsurprisingly, this cross-domain distinction was observed among majority belief, secular parents in China (Study 2). More importantly, however, the same pattern was observed among parents in Iran, a highly religious society (Study 1), as well as among minority belief, religious parents in China (Study 2). Thus, adults in markedly different belief communities spontaneously express less confidence in religious, as compared to scientific, invisible entities in naturalistic conversation. These findings contribute to theories on the role of culture and testimony in the development of beliefs about unobservable phenomena.

Models, systems, and descriptions

There are many different notions of models in different areas of science that are often not aligned, making it difficult to discuss them across disciplines. In this study, we look at the differences between physical models and mental models as well as the difference between static and dynamic models. Semiotics provides a philosophical underpinning by explaining meaning-making. This allows for identifying a common ground between models in different areas. We use examples from natural sciences and linguistics to illustrate different approaches and concepts and to find commonalities. This study distinguishes between systems, models, and descriptions of models. This distinction allows us to understand the commonalities of mental and physical models in different areas.

The debate over understanding in AI's large language models

We survey a current, heated debate in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community on whether large pretrained language models can be said to understand language-and the physical and social situations language encodes-in any humanlike sense. We describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding and key questions for the broader sciences of intelligence that have arisen in light of these arguments. We contend that an extended science of intelligence can be developed that will provide insight into distinct modes of understanding, their strengths and limitations, and the challenge of integrating diverse forms of cognition.

Play therapy in children with autism: Its role, implications, and limitations

Play is a pleasurable physical or mental activity that enhances the child's skills involving negotiation abilities, problem-solving, manual dexterity, sharing, decision-making, and working in a group. Play affects all the brain's areas, structures, and functions. Children with autism have adaptive behavior, adaptive response, and social interaction limitations. This review explores the different applications of play therapy in helping children with autism disorder. Play is usually significantly impaired in children with autism. Play therapy is mainly intended to help children to honor their unique mental abilities and developmental levels. The main aim of play therapy is to prevent or solve psychosocial difficulties and achieve optimal child-healthy growth and development. Play therapy helps children with autism to engage in play activities of their interest and choice to express themselves in the most comfortable ways. It changes their way of self-expression from unwanted behaviors to more non-injurious expressive behavior using toys or activities of their choice as their words. Play therapy also helps those children to experience feeling out various interaction styles. Every child with autism is unique and responds differently. Therefore, different types of intervention, like play therapy, could fit the differences in children with autism. Proper evaluation of the child is mandatory to evaluate which type fits the child more than the others. This narrative review revised the different types of play therapy that could fit children with autism in an evidence-based way. Despite weak evidence, play therapy still has potential benefits for patients and their families.

Older children verify adult claims because they are skeptical of those claims

We investigated children's information seeking in response to a surprising claim (Study 1, N = 109, 54 Female, Range = 4.02-6.94 years, 49% White, 21% Mixed Ethnicity, 19% Southeast Asian, September 2019-March 2020; Study 2, N = 154, 74 Female, Range = 4.09-7.99, 50% White, 20% Mixed Ethnicity, 17% Southeast Asian, September 2020-December 2020). Relative to younger children, older children more often expressed skepticism about the adult's surprising claims (1-year increase, OR = 2.70) and more often suggested exploration strategies appropriate for testing the specific claim they heard (1-year increase, OR = 1.42). Controlling for age, recommending more targeted exploration strategies was associated with a greater likelihood of expressing skepticism about the adult's claim.

Critical Thinking in Ethical and Neutral Settings in Gifted Children and Non-Gifted Children

The present study examined the performance on five phases of critical thinking in gifted and nongifted children in two settings: ethical and neutral. Ninety-one children, 32 gifted (8-10 years old), 32 normally developing children matched for chronological age (8-10 years old) and 27 normally developing children matched for mental age (12-13 years old) completed critical thinking tasks. The findings confirmed that intellectually gifted children had higher critical thinking capacity than typically developing children. The results reveal that the basic factor determining best performances in critical thinking is mental age and not chronological age. However, critical thinking ability was the same in ethical and neutral settings. Analysis of the phases of critical thinking show that the first and the third phase, clarification and evaluation, specifically differentiates gifted from nongifted children. These phases refer to the ability to understand the type of problem rapidly and to assess the credibility of statements and to assess the logical strength of the actual or intended inferential relationships among statements, descriptions, questions or other forms of representation.

Flexible Acceptance Condition of Generics from a Probabilistic Viewpoint: Towards Formalization of the Semantics of Generics

Formalization of the semantics of generics has been considered extremely challenging for their inherent vagueness and context-dependence that hinder a single fixed truth condition. The present study suggests a way to formalize the semantics of generics by constructing flexible acceptance conditions with comparative probabilities. Findings from our in-depth psycholinguistic experiment show that two comparative probabilities-cue validity and prevalence-indeed construct the flexible acceptance conditions for generics in a systematic manner that can be applied to a diverse types of generics: Acceptability of IS_A relational generics is mostly determined by prevalence without interaction with cue validity; feature-describing generics are endorsed acceptable with high cue validity, albeit mediated by prevalence; and acceptability of feature-describing generics with low cue validity is mostly determined by prevalence irrespective of cue validity. Such systematic patterns indicate a great potential for the formalization of the semantics of generics.

Applying the mixed-blessings model and labeling theory to stigma in inclusive education: An experimental study of student and trainee teachers’ perceptions of pupils with ADHD, DLD, and intellectual disability

Institutional and individual stigmatization represent major barriers that prevent children with disabilities from accessing education. It can be presumed that children with disabilities are labeled as such even in inclusive educational settings and that teachers’ attitudes toward inclusive education and children with disabilities play a crucial role in this context. Against this background, the present study aims to (a) apply and conceptualize the mixed-blessings model in the context of stigma-related reactions to children’s disability labels in inclusive education and (b) shed light on the causal attributions of teachers that underlie stigma-related attitudes toward children with various disabilities. A 3 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 online experiment examined the ways in which disability-specific causes and symptoms, the type of disability in question, the children’s sex, and efficacy cues regarding educational efforts affect future teachers’ attitudes toward and expectations of inclusive education as well as their social distance toward children with disabilities. The participants in this experiment were N = 605 German student and trainee teachers representing different types of teaching professions. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that, in particular, the cause attributed to the disability, the depicted type of disability and the probability of learning success led to changes in attitudes. Respondents’ teaching self-efficacy and their status as students or trainees emerged as moderators of the effect of pupils’ type of disability. As a result, teacher education and training as well as communication regarding pupils with disabilities require a high degree of sensitivity to disability-specific and efficacy-related cues to prevent (accidental) professional or institutional stigmatization.

Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others

Infants are born into networks of individuals who are socially connected. How do infants begin learning which individuals are their own potential social partners? Using digitally edited videos, we showed 12-mo-old infants' social interactions between unknown individuals and their own parents. In studies 1 to 4, after their parent showed affiliation toward one puppet, infants expected that puppet to engage with them. In study 5, infants made the reverse inference; after a puppet engaged with them, the infants expected that puppet to respond to their parent. In each study, infants' inferences were specific to social interactions that involved their own parent as opposed to another infant's parent. Thus, infants combine observation of social interactions with knowledge of their preexisting relationship with their parent to discover which newly encountered individuals are potential social partners for themselves and their families.

Overheard evaluative comments: Implications for beliefs about effort and ability

This research examined the effects of overhearing an adult praise an unseen child for not needing to work hard on an academic task. Five-year-old Han Chinese children (total N = 270 across three studies; 135 boys, collected 2020-2021) who heard this low effort praise tended to devalue effort relative to a baseline condition in which the overheard conversation lacked evaluative content. In Study 3, low effort praise increased children's endorsement of essentialist beliefs about ability and their interest in becoming the kind of person who does not need to work hard to succeed. The findings show that overhearing evaluative comments about other people, a pervasive feature of daily life, can have a systematic effect on young children's beliefs about achievement.

Exploring Patterns of Stability and Change in Caregivers' Word Usage Across Early Childhood

The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child-directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co-occurrence. Previous work using these models has not measured how these patterns may change throughout development, however. In this work, we leverage natural language processing methods-originally developed to study historical language change-to compare caregivers' use of words when talking to younger versus older children. Some words' usage changed more than others; this variability could be predicted based on the word's properties at both the individual and category levels. These findings suggest that caregivers' changing patterns of word use may play a role in scaffolding children's acquisition of conceptual structure in early development.

Correspondence in parents' and children's concepts of god: Investigating the role of parental values, religious practices and executive functioning

This study examined the extent to which children's concepts of God correspond with their parents' concepts of God. It also examined how parent‐context factors and children's executive functioning relate to parent–child conceptual similarity. Parent–child dyads from varied religious and racial backgrounds participated. Dyads had the greatest conceptual similarity concerning God's mind‐dependent functions. Though correspondence between parents and children was lowest concerning God's body‐dependent functions, dyads were more similar about those functions when parents engaged in more frequent religious practices with their child and thought God was important. Children's concepts of God were unrelated to religious practices, and parent–child conceptual similarity was unrelated to children's age and executive functioning. Simply put, variation among parents' anthropomorphic concepts of God drove variation in parent–child conceptual similarity. Overall, these findings suggest that embodied concepts of God may be most sensitive to cultural input and that socialization practices provide greater insight into parents' anthropomorphic concepts.

How children revise their beliefs in light of reasons

We investigate how the ability to respond appropriately to reasons provided in discourse develops in young children. In Study 1 (N = 58, Germany, 26 girls), 4- and 5-, but not 3-year-old children, differentiated good from bad reasons. In Study 2 (N = 131, Germany, 64 girls), 4- and 5-year-old children considered both the strength of evidence for their initial belief and the quality of socially provided reasons for an alternative view when deciding whether to change their minds. Study 3 (N = 80, the United States, 42 girls, preregistered) shows that 4- and 5-year-old children also consider meta-reasons (reasons about reasons) in their belief revision. These results suggest that by age 4, children possess key critical thinking capacities for participating in public discourse.

Belief, culture, & development: Insights from studying the development of religious beliefs and behaviors

We describe the theoretical and methodological contributions of a cultural and developmental approach to the study of religious belief and behavior. We focus on how the study of religious development can provide a foothold into answering some key questions in developmental science: What is belief? What is culture? What is the nature of human development? Throughout the chapter, we provide examples of methodological innovations that have emerged over the course of the first year of a global, collaborative research project into the development of religious beliefs and behaviors.

Lay beliefs about the causes and treatment of depression: Tests of measurement models and associations

BACKGROUND

There is reason to expect beliefs about depression's causes and treatment to influence use of psychotherapy, but the literature is marked by theoretical, methodological, and empirical inconsistencies. This study assessed the factorial validity of measures of beliefs about depression's causes and formal treatment versus self-management. It also tested the links of causal attributions to general treatment/self-management beliefs and endorsement of specific interventions.

METHODS

The revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R) adapted for depression was administered online to a non-patient, U.S. sample (N = 319).

RESULTS

Confirmatory factor analyses yielded three causal dimensions, Environmental Stressors, Biological Factors, and Personal Attributes, and two control dimensions, (Formal) Treatment and Personal. Both models fit irrespective of whether respondents believed they had ever experienced depression. A structural equation model (SEM) showed a positive relationship for Environmental and Biological attributions, and an inverse relationship for Personal attributions, in predicting general preferences for Formal Treatment. A second SEM, focusing on specific interventions, linked Environmental causation to endorsement of psychotherapy, dietary changes, and self-help, and Biological causation to endorsement of medication and exercise, with Personal causation inversely associated with endorsement of psychotherapy.

LIMITATIONS

A cross-sectional, correlational design precludes causal inferences. Potential sociocultural influences were not assessed.

CONCLUSIONS

Modifications to the IPQ-R suggested by this study improved its psychometric properties, validated its distinction between Treatment and Personal Control beliefs, and supported examination of both general and specific beliefs about ways to deal with depression. Relationships linking cause and treatment beliefs warrant further investigation as potential intervention targets to increase treatment utilization.

Clusters, lines and webs-so does my patient have psychosis? reflections on the use of psychiatric conceptual frameworks from a clinical vantage point

Mental health professionals working in hospitals or community clinics inevitably face the realisation that we possess imperfect conceptual means to understand mental disorders. In this paper the authors bring together ideas from the fields of Philosophy, Psychiatry, Cognitive Psychology and Linguistics to reflect on the ways we represent phenomena of high practical importance that we often take for granted, but are nevertheless difficult to define in ontological terms. The paper follows through the development of the concept of psychosis over the last two centuries in the interplay of three different conceptual orientations: the categorical, dimensional and network approaches. Each of these represent the available knowledge and dominant thinking styles of the era in which they emerged and take markedly different stances regarding the nature of mental phenomena. Without particular commitment to any ontological positions or models described, the authors invite the reader into a thinking process about the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and how they can be reconciled in multidisciplinary settings to benefit the process of patient care.

Fairies in the Box: Children’s Perception and Interaction towards Voice Assistants

In recent years, the growing popularity of smart speakers (e.g., Google Home and Alexa) has facilitated young children’s interaction with internet-based devices and provided them with more opportunities to obtain access to online information. This review summarizes the current state of the research by examining smart speakers’ core characteristics, children’s conceptualization and interaction with smart speakers, and the influences on children’s learning and habits. Our review shows that (a) the natural language processing technology and central computing system (Internet) contribute to the uniqueness of smart speakers; (b) although children tend to attribute human characteristics (e.g., smart and friendly) to smart speakers, they might judge these voice assistant devices as neither explicitly living nor nonliving in ontological perception; (c) children’s overattributing certain knowledge (e.g., questions about personal information) to smart speakers does not necessarily mean that this device is believed to be omniscient; and (d) in terms of promoting children’s learning, smart speakers might not be more effective than a real human, and the interaction with smart speakers may not be conducive to children’s maintenance of civilized social norms. Implications for children’s conceptualization and interaction of smart speakers and the design of children-oriented smart agents are also discussed.

The Effects of Gendered Parenting on Child Development Outcomes: A Systematic Review

Gender role development occurs in the earliest months and years of a child's life. Parental attitudes, behaviours and modelling are likely to play a significant role in this process; however, to date no review has been conducted to consolidate knowledge of the effects of differential parenting on child development. This systematic review aimed to investigate the evidence for differential parenting behaviours based on child gender that affect child development, across six areas (vocalisation, socialisation, play, toys, dress and décor). Searches were conducted for English article using four databases: psycINFO, CINAHL, Sociological Abstract, and SCOPUS. The inclusion criteria were biological or adoptive parents, of a typically developing child aged below five, using any parenting behaviour or strategies that differed by child gender. 45 studies were included in this systematic review (14 vocalisation, 21 socialisation, 7 play, 3 toys). A variety of gender-differentiated parenting behaviours and child outcomes were examined. The review found evidence that parents do respond differently to their children. Parents vocalised differently, used different socialising strategies, played differently and provided different toys to their sons and daughters. This differential parenting was associated with some differences in child development across child gender, including differences in child vocalisation, displays of affect, pain responses, compliance, toy play and aggression. However, the overall quality of the evidence, the lack of longitudinal studies and the heterogeneous nature of the outcomes examined suggest the need for a systematic approach to examining the nature and effects of differential parenting on children's development.

Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Associations Among Children's Interpersonal Trust, Reputation for Trustworthiness, and Relationship Closeness

Interpersonal trust plays a crucial role in the formation and maintenance of social relationships. The present cross-sectional and longitudinal research examines the development of interpersonal trust judgments with reference to (1) the trustee's reputation for trustworthiness, and (2) the nature of the trustor's relationship closeness with the trustee. There were 194 7- to 13-year-olds who participated in the first wave of the study, and 107 of those individuals also participated in two subsequent waves across a 2-year period. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal results showed that with age, reputation for trustworthiness becomes less important and relationship closeness become more important. We also found that relationship closeness played a greater role in interpersonal trust evaluations for girls than for boys. These findings indicate that the way children make trust evaluations becomes increasingly relationship-specific over time and is more relationship-specific for girls than for boys.

Of Kids and Unicorns: How Rational Is Children's Trust in Testimonial Knowledge?

When young children confront a vast array of adults' testimonial claims, they should decide which testimony to endorse. If they are unable to immediately verify the content of testimonial assertions, children adopt or reject their informants' statements on the basis of forming trust in the sources of testimony. This kind of trust needs to be based on some underlying reasons. The rational choice theory, which currently dominates the social, cognitive, and psychological sciences, posits that trust should be formed on a rational basis, as a result of probabilistic assessments and utility-maximizing calculations. In this paper, the predictions stemming from the rational choice approach to trust are systematically compared with the empirical evidence from the field of developmental psychology on how children establish their trust in testimonial statements. The results of this comparison demonstrate an obvious inadequacy of the rational choice explanation of the emergence and development of children's testimonial trust, regardless of which form of trust rationality-weighting, threshold, or ordering-is examined. As none of the three forms of rationality of children's trust in testimony squares with the empirical data, this paper introduces a new version of trust rationality, adaptively rational trust. It explores the compatibility of the concept of adaptively rational trust with the recent empirical findings in the area of developmental psychology and addresses some avenues for future research on the rationality of testimonial trust.

What happened? Do preschool children and capuchin monkeys spontaneously use visual traces to locate a reward?

The ability to infer unseen causes from evidence is argued to emerge early in development and to be uniquely human. We explored whether preschoolers and capuchin monkeys could locate a reward based on the physical traces left following a hidden event. Preschoolers and capuchin monkeys were presented with two cups covered with foil. Behind a barrier, an experimenter (E) punctured the foil coverings one at a time, revealing the cups with one cover broken after the first event and both covers broken after the second. One event involved hiding a reward, the other event was performed with a stick (order counterbalanced). Preschoolers and, with additional experience, monkeys could connect the traces to the objects used in the puncturing events to find the reward. Reversing the order of events perturbed the performance of 3-year olds and capuchins, while 4-year-old children performed above chance when the order of events was reversed from the first trial. Capuchins performed significantly better on the ripped foil task than they did on an arbitrary test in which the covers were not ripped but rather replaced with a differently patterned cover. We conclude that by 4 years of age children spontaneously reason backwards from evidence to deduce its cause.

How does a blind person see? Developmental change in applying visual verbs to agents with disabilities

Classic theories emphasize the primacy of first-person sensory experience for learning meanings of words: to know what "see" means, one must be able to use the eyes to perceive. Contrary to this idea, blind adults and children acquire normative meanings of "visual" verbs, e.g., interpreting "see" and "look" to mean with the eyes for sighted agents. Here we ask the flip side of this question: how easily do sighted children acquire the meanings of "visual" verbs as they apply to blind agents? We asked sighted 4-, 6- and 9-year-olds to tell us what part of the body a blind or a sighted agent would use to "see", "look" (and other visual verbs, n = 5), vs. "listen", "smell" (and other non-visual verbs, n = 10). Even the youngest children consistently reported the correct body parts for sighted agents (eyes for "look", ears for "listen"). By contrast, there was striking developmental change in applying "visual" verbs to blind agents. Adults, 9- and 6-year-olds, either extended visual verbs to other modalities for blind agents (e.g., "seeing" with hands or a cane) or stated that the blind agent "cannot" "look" or "see". By contrast, 4-year-olds said that a blind agent would use her eyes to "see", "look", etc., even while explicitly acknowledging that the agent's "eyes don't work". Young children also endorsed "she is looking at the dax" descriptions of photographs where the blind agent had the object in her "line of sight", irrespective of whether she had physical contact with the object. This pattern held for leg-motion verbs ("walk", "run") applied to wheelchair users. The ability to modify verb modality for agents with disabilities undergoes developmental change between 4 and 6. Despite this, we find that 4-year-olds are sensitive to the semantic distinction between active ("look") and stative ("see"), even when applied to blind agents. These results challenge the primacy of first-person sensory experience and highlight the importance of linguistic input and social interaction in the acquisition of verb meaning.

Young Children’s Judgments of Counter-Intuitive Information and Its Relation with Executive Function

Objectives: This study examined young children’s judgments of counter-intuitive information, and whether their judgments relate to the executive function and theory of mind.Methods: Ninety-two children aged 3 to 6 years were provided with counter-intuitive information that the smallest doll was the heaviest among five Russian dolls in a one-on-one interview with a researcher. Subsequently, how children judged the weights of the dolls, whether they did an experiment to check the weights during the researcher’s absence, how they judged the weights upon the researcher’s suggestion, and whether their judgments were related to the executive function and theory of mind were examined.Results: Following the researcher’s counter-intuitive information, the 3-year-olds were more likely to judge that the smallest one might be the heaviest. Further, spontaneous experiments during the researcher’s absence were conducted only among a small number of children aged 4-years and up. There were no more differences in judgments of weight among age groups of children when it came to checking the actual weights of the dolls upon the researcher’s suggestion. Additionally, children with better inhibitory and shifting ability tended to judge the heaviest doll based on their own intuition. A multiple regression analysis, controlling for relevant variables showed that only shifting ability predicted the children’s judgments based on their intuition before the suggested experiment.Conclusion: With age, young children may come to judge a physical situation based on their own clear intuition, rather than merely following another’s counter-intuitive information. This tendency appears to be related to the executive function, especially shifting ability.

Preschool Children Rarely Seek Empirical Data That Could Help Them Complete a Task When Observation and Testimony Conflict

Children (N = 278, 34-71 months, 54% girls) were told which of two figurines turned on a music box and also observed empirical evidence either confirming or conflicting with that testimony. Children were then asked to sort novel figurines according to whether they could make the music box work or not. To see whether children would explore which figurine turned on the music box, especially when the observed and testimonial evidence conflicted, children were given access to the music box during their sorting. However, children rarely explored. Indeed, they struggled to disregard the misleading testimony both when sorting the figurines and when asked about a future attempt. In contrast, children who explored the effectiveness of the figurines dismissed the misleading testimony.

Children's developing capacity to calibrate the verbal testimony of others with observed evidence when inferring causal relations

Across two studies (N = 120), we investigated the development of children's ability to calibrate the certainty of verbal testimony with observable data that varied in the degree of predictive causal accuracy. In Study 1, 4- and 5-year-olds heard a certain explanation or an uncertain explanation about deterministic causal relations. The 5-year-olds made more accurate causal inferences when the informant provided a certain and more calibrated explanation. In Study 2, children heard similar explanations about probabilistic relations, making the uncertain informant more calibrated. The 5-year-olds were more likely to infer the correct causal relations when the informant was uncertain, but only when the explanation was attuned to the stochasticity of the individual causal events (or outcomes that sometimes occur). These findings imply that the capacity to integrate, and make efficient inferences, from distinct sources of knowledge emerges during the preschool years.

Concepts of God and Germs: Social Mechanisms and Cognitive Heuristics

Previous research has shown that the more individuals view observable entities as animate, the more those entities are associated with having psychological and physiological experiences. This study examined the relationship between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for concepts of unobservable scientific (i.e., germ) and religious (i.e., God) entities. This study further explored how children's conceptions vary according to the social learning opportunities (i.e., discourse, rituals) parents reportedly create. Parent-child dyads with young children from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds participated. Three central findings emerged. First, children readily associated God with psychobiological characteristics but did not do so to the same extent for germs. Second, children applied more psychobiological properties to both entity types when they believed that the entity was animate. Third, engaging in rituals and discourse with parents was indirectly related to children's concepts of God but not related to their concepts of germs. Overall, this study presented support for a connection between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for unobservable entities, and an indirect effect of cultural input on this reasoning. The implications of these findings will be discussed.

Children's and Adults' Views of Punishment as a Path to Redemption

The current work investigated the extent to which children (N=171 6- to 8-year-olds) and adults (N = 94) view punishment as redemptive. In Study 1, children-but not adults-reported that "mean" individuals became "nicer" after one severe form of punishment (incarceration). Moreover, adults expected "nice" individuals' moral character to worsen following punishment; however, we did not find that children expected such a change. Study 2 extended these findings by showing that children view "mean" individuals as becoming "nicer" following both severe (incarceration) and relatively minor (time-out) punishments, suggesting that the pattern of results from Study 1 generalizes across punishment types. Together, these studies indicate that children-but not adults-may view punishment as a vehicle for redemption.

Developing Expertise in 1H NMR Spectral Interpretation

Advancements in organic chemistry depend upon chemists' ability to interpret NMR spectra, though research demonstrates that cultivating such proficiency requires years of graduate-level study. The organic chemistry community thus needs insight into how this expertise develops to expedite learning among its newest members. This study investigated undergraduate and doctoral chemistry students' understanding and information processing during the interpretation of ¹H NMR spectra and complementary IR spectra. Eighteen undergraduate and seven doctoral chemistry students evaluated the outcome of a series of syntheses using spectra corresponding to the products. Eye movements were measured to identify differences in cognitive processes between undergraduate and doctoral participants, and interviews were conducted to elucidate the chemical assumptions that guided participants' reasoning. Results suggest five areas of understanding are necessary for interpreting spectra, and progress in understanding corresponds to increasing knowledge of experimental and implicit chemical variables. Undergraduate participants exhibited uninformed bidirectional processing of all information, whereas doctoral participants exhibited informed unidirectional processing of relevant information. These findings imply the community can support novices' development of expertise by cultivating relevant understanding and encouraging use of informed interpretation strategies, including preliminary evaluation of relevant variables, prediction of expected spectral features, and search for complementary data across spectra.