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Several studies have investigated factors guiding children's decisions when learning from others, although less is known about factors that govern children's decisions when they transfer knowledge to others. Here we asked whether children would privilege ingroup members when teaching and, if so, whether this tendency would persist when transferring different kinds of information (conventional norms vs. moral norms). In Experiment 1 (N = 24), we first replicated ingroup preference based on minimal group membership with 5- and 6-year-old Turkish children. In Experiment 2 (N = 64), we examined whether children would consider group membership and the type of knowledge to be transferred in their teaching intentions. Children were introduced to two ignorant targets differing in their group membership and were asked to choose one or both of these targets to teach conventional or moral norms. Children were more likely to choose ingroup members for teaching conventional norms and both members when teaching moral norms. Further, this trend was particularly evident among girls. These results suggest that children make flexible teaching decisions considering the social attributes of the learners and raise interesting questions regarding the mechanisms underlying children's information transfer.

Children are sensitive to their own and others' epistemic states and use these to guide their learning and communication. Here, we systematically examined children's use of epistemic states to make diagnostic social inferences. Specifically, we investigated children's group membership inferences based on what others do and do not know and what role children's own knowledge states and the type of knowledge play in these inferences. Across two preregistered studies, 7- and 8-year-old children (N = 100) were shown targets who were knowledgeable (Study 1) or ignorant (Study 2) of familiar and unfamiliar knowledge items that were either general or culture-specific and asked to guess whether the targets would be linguistic ingroup or outgroup members. Children inferred that the targets would speak their native language if they shared targets' epistemic states and a foreign language if they did not. Importantly, these patterns were particularly evident when epistemic states involved cultural knowledge. Further, children's inferences became more nuanced with age. These findings suggest that others' knowledge states are socially meaningful in childhood and children use their own and others' epistemic states in flexible ways to guide their diagnostic social judgments.

Children's and adults' attributions of shared knowledge of and shared preference for songs were investigated across two prominent social categories: language and gender. Both attributions indicate similarity among individuals but shared cultural knowledge can be more informative about common social history than shared preference, as it is mainly transferred through social interactions within cultures, while preferences can have various sources. Both 5- to 6-year-old children (N = 60) and adults (N = 160) generalized knowledge of songs across individuals who speak the same-language rather than same-gender individuals. In contrast, preference for songs was not systematically generalized across either category. Thus, individuals selectively infer shared cultural knowledge among same-language speakers, suggesting an early emerging link between shared knowledge and cultural boundaries.

Children and adults express greater confidence in the existence of invisible scientific as compared to invisible religious entities. To further examine this differential confidence, 5‐ to 11‐year‐old Turkish children and their parents (N = 174, 122 females) from various regions in Türkiye, a country with an ongoing tension between secularism and religion, were tested in 2021 for their belief in invisible entities. Participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific than religious entities. For scientific entities, children justified their belief primarily by elaborating on the properties of the entity, rather than referring to the testimonial source of their judgment. This pattern was reversed for religious entities, arguably, highlighting the role of polarization in shaping the testimony children typically hear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants show attentional biases for certain individuals over others based on various cues. However, the role of these biases in shaping infants' preferences and learning is not clear. This study asked whether infants' preference for native speakers (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007) would modulate their preferences for tunes. After getting equal exposure to two different tunes introduced by two speakers, 7-month-olds (N = 32) listened longer to the tune that was introduced by a native speaker compared to the tune that was introduced by a foreign speaker. This suggests that the social-emotional context in which exposure to stimuli occurs influences auditory preferences, and that the early emerging attentional biases might have important ramifications regarding social learning in early infancy.

Despite the ubiquity of dancing and synchronized movement to music, relatively few studies have examined cognitive representations of musical rhythm and meter among listeners from contrasting cultures. We aimed to disentangle the contributions of culture-general and culture-specific influences by examining American and Turkish listeners' detection of temporal disruptions (varying in size from 50-250 ms in duration) to three types of stimuli: simple rhythms found in both American and Turkish music, complex rhythms found only in Turkish music, and highly complex rhythms that are rare in all cultures. Americans were most accurate when detecting disruptions to the simple rhythm. However, they performed less accurately but comparably in both the complex and highly complex conditions. By contrast, Turkish participants performed accurately and indistinguishably in both simple and complex conditions. However, they performed less accurately in the unfamiliar, highly complex condition. Together, these experiments implicate a crucial role of culture-specific listening experience and acquired musical knowledge in rhythmic pattern perception. (Contains 4 figures and 1 footnote.)

Effects of culture-specific experience on musical rhythm perception are evident by 12 months of age, but the role of culture-general rhythm processing constraints during early infancy has not been explored. Using a habituation procedure with 5- and 7-month-old infants, we investigated effects of temporal interval ratio complexity on discrimination of standard from novel musical patterns containing 200-ms disruptions. Infants were tested in three ratio conditions: simple (2:1), which is typical in Western music, complex (3:2), which is typical in other musical cultures, and highly complex (7:4), which is relatively rare in music throughout the world. Unlike adults and older infants, whose accuracy was predicted by familiarity, younger infants were influenced by ratio complexity, as shown by their successful discrimination in the simple and complex conditions but not in the highly complex condition. The findings suggest that ratio complexity constrains rhythm perception even prior to the acquisition of culture-specific biases.

Infants prefer native structures such as familiar faces and languages. Music is a universal human activity containing structures that vary cross-culturally. For example, Western music has temporally regular metric structures, whereas music of the Balkans (e.g., Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey) can have both regular and irregular structures. We presented 4- to 8-month-old American and Turkish infants with contrasting melodies to determine whether cultural background would influence their preferences for musical meter. In Experiment 1, American infants preferred Western over Balkan meter, whereas Turkish infants, who were familiar with both Western and Balkan meters, exhibited no preference. Experiments 2 and 3 presented infants with either a Western or Balkan meter paired with an arbitrary rhythm with complex ratios not common to any musical culture. Both Turkish and American infants preferred Western and Balkan meter to an arbitrary meter. Infants' musical preferences appear to be driven by culture-specific experience and a culture-general preference for simplicity. (Contains 2 figures and 1 footnote.)

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Children display an "essentialist" bias in their everyday thinking about social categories. However, the degree and form of this bias varies with age and with the nature of the categories, as well as across cultures. This project investigated the development of the essentialist bias across five social categories (i.e., gender, nationality, religious affiliation, socioeconomic status (rich/poor), and sports-team supporter) in two countries. Children between 5 and 10 years of age in Turkey (Study 1, N = 74) and the United States (Study 2, N = 73), as well as adults in both countries (Study 3, N = 223), participated. Results indicate surprising cross-cultural parallels with respect to both the rank ordering of essentialist thinking across these five categories and increasing differentiation among them over development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]