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Bullot & Reber (B&R) provide compelling evidence that sensitivity to context, history, and design stance are crucial to theories of art appreciation. We ask how these ideas relate to broader aspects of human cognition. Further open questions concern how psychological essentialism contributes to art appreciation and how essentialism regarding created artifacts (such as art) differs from essentialism in other domains.

Decades of research suggest that learning styles, or the belief that people learn better when they receive instruction in their dominant way of learning, may be one of the most pervasive myths about cognition. Nonetheless, little is known about what it means to believe in learning styles. The present investigation uses one theoretical framework--psychological essentialism--to explore the content and consistency of people's learning style beliefs. Psychological essentialism is a belief that certain categories (such as dogs, girls, or visual learners) have an underlying reality or true nature that is biologically based and highly predictive of many other features (Gelman, 2003). We tested the prevalence of erroneous essentialist beliefs regarding learning styles in both educators and noneducators, including that learning styles are innate, unchanging, discrete, and wired into the brain. In each of two experiments, we identified two groups of learning style believers, with one group holding an essentialist interpretation of learning styles, and the other group holding a nonessentialist interpretation of learning styles. No differences were found between educators' and noneducators' beliefs. In fact, only one factor was found to be a significant predictor of learning style beliefs for educators: the age of the population with whom they work. Specifically, those who worked with younger children were more likely to interpret learning styles in an essentialist way. Together the findings demonstrate that learning style beliefs are far more complex and variable than previously recognized.

Psychological essentialism is a folk theory characterized by the belief that a causal internal essence or force gives rise to the common outward behaviors or attributes of a category's members. In two studies, we investigated whether 4- to 7-year-old children evidenced essentialist reasoning about heart transplants by asking them to predict whether trading hearts with an individual would cause them to take on the donor's attributes. Control conditions asked children to consider the effects of trading money with an individual. Results indicated that children reasoned according to essentialism, predicting more transfer of attributes in the transplant condition versus the non-bodily money control. Children also endorsed essentialist transfer of attributes even when they did not believe that a transplant would change the recipient's category membership (e.g., endorsing the idea that a recipient of a pig's heart would act pig-like, but denying that the recipient would "become" a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from a strong interpretation of the "minimalist" position, an alternative to essentialism.

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has had a disproportionate impact on Black, low-income, and elderly individuals. We recruited 175 predominantly white children ages 5-12 and their parents (N = 112) and asked which of two individuals (differing in age, gender, race, social class, or personality) was more likely to get sick with either COVID-19 or the common cold and why. Children and parents reported that older adults were more likely to get sick than younger adults, but reported few differences based on gender, race, social class, or personality. Children predominantly used behavioral explanations, but older children used more biological and structural explanations. Thus, children have some understanding of health disparities, and their understanding increases with age.

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart would act more pig-like but denying that the recipient would "become" a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from the strongest version of the "minimalist" position (Strevens,2000), an alternative to essentialism. Finally, studies asking about a broader range of donor-to-recipient transfers indicated that Indians essentialized more types of transfers than Americans, but neither sample essentialized monetary transfer. This suggests that results from bodily transplant conditions reflect genuine essentialism rather than broader magical thinking. (Contains 10 tables and 3 notes.)

Two studies compared how preschoolers through fifth graders and adults reasoned about psychogenic bodily reactions such as stress-induced headaches. Results supported a developmental path: younger children view psychogenic bodily responses as wholly physical, but with age, view them as both physical and psychological. (Author/KB)

Power differences are observed in children's early relationships, yet little is known about how children conceptualize social power. Study 1 recruited adults (n = 35) to assess the validity of a series of vignettes to measure five dimensions of social power. Using these vignettes, Study 2 (149 three- to nine-year-olds, 42 adults) and Study 3 (86 three- to nine-year-olds, 22 adults) showed that children visiting a science museum at a middle class university town are sensitive to several dimensions of social power from a young age; however, an adult-like breadth of power concepts does not develop until 7-9 years. Children understand social power whether the powerful character is malevolent or benevolent, though malevolent power is easier to detect for children and adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological essentialism is a set of lay beliefs about categories, according to which certain categories are seen as natural and arising from an inborn, causal force or 'essence.' Social categories, including gender, are often essentialized by both adults and children. The current study examines how gender essentialism relates to other gender-relevant beliefs and preferences, in both a child sample (5- to 7-year-olds) and an adult sample (the children's parents). Children's and parents' essentialism predicted children's gender-typed preferences, but not children's prescriptive stereotyping. In contrast, parents' essentialism predicted their own prescriptive stereotyping, but not their gender-typed preferences. Implications of these findings are discussed in the contexts of (a) past findings linking essentialism with stereotyping and (b) the practical implications of developmental shifts in the correlates of essentialism, including ways in which stereotyping and rigid beliefs about gender may be reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categorizations of multiracial individuals provide insight into the development of racial concepts. Children's (4-13 years) and adults', both White (Study 1) and Black (Study 2; N = 387), categorizations of multiracial individuals were examined. White children (unlike Black children) more often categorized multiracial individuals as Black than as White in the absence of parentage information. White and Black adults (unlike children) more often categorized multiracial individuals as Black than as White, even when knowing the individuals' parentage. Children's rates of in-group contact predicted their categorizations. These data suggest that a tendency to categorize multiracial individuals as Black relative to White emerges early in development and results from perceptual biases in White children but ideological motives in White and Black adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how informants' traits affect how children seek information, trust testimony, and make inferences about informants' knowledge. Eighty-one 3- to 6-year-olds and 26 adults completed tasks where they requested and endorsed information provided by one of two informants with conflicting traits (e.g., honesty vs. dishonesty). Participants also completed tasks where they simultaneously considered informants' traits and visual access to information when inferring their knowledge and trusting their testimony. Children and adults preferred to ask and endorse information provided by people who are nice, smart, and honest. Moreover, these traits influenced the knowledge that young children attributed to informants. Children younger than 5 years of age reported that people with positive traits were knowledgeable even when they lacked access to relevant information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human cognition is characterized by enormous variability and structured by universal psychological constraints. The focus of this article is on the development of knowledge acquisition because it provides important insight into how the mind interprets new information and constructs new ways of understanding. We propose that mental content can be productively approached by examining the intuitive causal explanatory 'theories' that people construct to explain, interpret, and intervene in the world around them, including theories of mind, biology, or physics. A substantial amount of research in cognitive developmental psychology supports the integral role of intuitive theories in human learning and provides evidence that they structure, constrain, and guide the development of human cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting how people will behave in the future is a critical social-cognitive task. In four studies (N = 150, ages preschool to adult), young children (ages 4-5) used category information to guide their expectations about individual consistency. They predicted that psychological properties (preferences and fears) would remain consistent over time after hearing one example in which properties followed a category-linked distribution (e.g., children of different genders had different properties) but not when properties varied within a category (e.g., children of the same gender had different properties). The developmental course of these findings is examined. Results suggest the importance of considering how children’s emerging theories of behavior and of social groups operate together to inform their expectations about the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Humans construe their environment as composed largely of discrete individuals, which are also members of kinds (e.g., trees, cars, and people). On what basis do young children determine individual identity? How important are featural properties (e.g., physical appearance, name) relative to spatiotemporal history? Two studies examined the relative importance of these factors in preschoolers’ and adults’ identity judgments. Participants were shown pairs of individuals who looked identical but differed in their spatiotemporal history (e.g., two physically distinct but identical Winnie-the-Pooh dolls), and were asked whether both members in the pair would have access to knowledge that had been supplied to only one of the pairs. The results provide clear support for spatiotemporal history as the primary basis of identity judgments in both preschoolers and adults, and further place issues of identity within the broader cognitive framework of psychological essentialism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The present set of studies examined children's and college students' recognition of the role of time in the manifestation of causes and cures for illnesses and injuries. In Study 1, participants ranging from 4-year-olds through college students were presented with biological, moral, psychological, and irrelevant causes for illness symptoms and were asked how much time elapsed between the cause and the symptom. They were also asked if medicine would make the person feel better and if so how much time elapsed between taking the medicine and feeling better. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with 4- and 5-year-olds. Study 3 examined whether 4- and 5-year-olds and college students could differentiate between physical and emotional reactions to illnesses and injuries, with regard to time course. Overall, young children underestimate how long it takes for illness symptoms to emerge (expecting them to result right away following exposure to contamination). Nonetheless, children generated longer timelines for biological cures than biological causes. Moreover, 4- and 5-year-olds expect physical and emotional reactions to follow different time courses. These results suggest that young children have a nascent expectation that biological events are distinct from non-biological events, in how they unfold over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the development of children's reasoning about the origin of human psychological traits. Factors influencing children's beliefs; Children's differentiation between physiological and psychological traits; Development of belief systems among children; Extent to which psychological traits are viewed as a product of environmental influences.

Three studies investigated children's capacity to use trait labels as tools for making inferences about mental states. For example, knowledge that a story character is "nice" as opposed to "mean" could lead to predictions that the character would respond with greater negative affect upon discovering that his or her action had made someone upset. Study 1 (N = 48) examined whether participants (kindergartners, second graders, fifth graders, and adults) would make different psychological inferences based on whether a character was labeled as "nice" versus "mean." Study 2 (N = 30) examined the same issue with 4-year-olds using a simpler methodology. Study 3 (N = 30) extended the results of Study 2, by examining whether describing characters as "shy" versus "not shy" would lead 4-year-olds to make different mental state inferences. Taken together, these findings suggest that even for young children, trait labels can serve as a basis for making nonobvious inferences. Developmental differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses contemporary concern with domains of cognition and naive theories. Revolutionary topics in the study of cognitive development; Various domains and hypotheses; Theories of mind; Contrasting views; Prevalence of interdisciplinary research; Discussion.

Ownership is at the heart of people's daily activities and has been throughout history. People consider ownership when acting on objects, engaging in financial matters, and assessing the acceptability of actions. We propose that people's understanding of ownership depends on an early-emerging, causally powerful, naïve theory of ownership. We draw on research from multiple disciplines to suggest that, from childhood, a naïve theory of ownership includes ontological commitments, causal-explanatory reasoning, and unobservable constructs. These components are unlikely to stem from other core theories or from noncausal representations. We also address why people might have a naïve theory of ownership, how it develops across the lifespan, and whether aspects of this theory may be universal despite variation across cultures and history. Highlights We propose that people's understandings of ownership constitute a naïve theory, with distinctive ontology, causal-explanatory reasoning, and unobservables. Ownership is a distinct domain of reasoning. Traditionally proposed domains (i.e., psychology, biology, physics) are insufficient to explain people's understandings of ownership. Successful reasoning about ownership requires a cognitive system that considers more than perceptual information. From early childhood, people's naïve theory of ownership is causally powerful and allows them to explain and predict actions directed towards property. Even toddlers recognize major ontological commitments of ownership and that ownership uniquely permits reasoning about owners and property. Aspects of ownership reasoning show continuity across cultures and history, suggesting that it may be subserved by a foundational naïve theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects the opinion of the author on the study conducted about the contributions of conceptual and perceptual information in the children's classification and induction of natural kinds. The author expressed that the approach of the researchers to each of the key constructs such as the concept, perceptual information. categorization and induction, unfortunately misses the point. The authors believed that ziblets and flurps of the researchers are arbitrary categories.

Research with U.S. samples found that children use descriptive group regularities (characteristics shared by individuals within a group) to generate prescriptive judgments (characteristics that should be shared by individuals within a group). Here, we assessed this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency in a sample of children (ages 4–13 years) and adults (ages 18–40 years) from mainland China. Participants were introduced to novel groups (i.e., Hibbles and Glerks) who engaged in contrasting morally neutral behaviors (e.g., listening to different kinds of music) and then to conforming and non-conforming individuals (e.g., a Hibble who listened to music more typical of Glerks). Like U.S. children, Chinese children disapproved of non-conformity and rates of disapproval declined with age. However, compared with U.S. children, younger Chinese children (ages 4–6 years) rated non-conformity more disapprovingly, and unlike U.S. adults, Chinese adults rated non-conformity more negatively than conformity. Moreover, compared with U.S. participants, Chinese participants across all age groups appealed more often to norm-based explanations when justifying their disapproval. These data provide a cross-cultural replication of children’s descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency but also reveal cross-cultural variation, and they have implications for understanding the mechanisms that underlie stereotyping and normative reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]