Gil Diesendruck

The principles of conventionality and contrast in word learning: an empirical examination.

In Study 1, 4-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when exposed to a common or a proper noun in a puppets presence or to a common noun in a puppets absence, but not when exposed to a proper noun in a puppets absence. In Study 2, 3-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when the requester for the referent of a second label in a different language was bilingual and present during naming, but not when the speaker was bilingual but absent or monolingual. Study 3 followed up on the results of the first 2 studies. When children could assume that the puppet knew the name the experimenter used, they inferred that the puppets use of a different name implied a different referential intent.

The influence of language and socioeconomic status on children's understanding of false belief.

Study 1 investigated whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages express false belief influence childrens performance on standard false belief tasks. Preschoolers speaking languages with explicit terms (Turkish and Puerto Rican Spanish) were compared with preschoolers speaking languages without explicit terms (Brazilian Portuguese and English) on questions assessing false belief understanding either specifically (the think question) or more generally (the look for question). Lexical explicitness influenced responses to the think question only. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with groups of both speakers differing in socioeconomic status (SES). A local effect of explicitness was found again as well as a more general influence of SES. The findings are discussed with regard to possible relations among language, SES, and understanding of mind.

How Writing System and Age Influence Spatial Representations of Actions A Developmental, Cross-Linguistic Study

Recently, researchers reported a bias for placing agents predominantly on the left side of pictures. Both hemispheric specialization and cultural preferences have been hypothesized to be the origin of this bias. To evaluate these hypotheses, we conducted a study with participants exposed to different reading and writing systems: Germans, who use a left-to-right system, and Israelis, who use a right-to-left system. In addition, we manipulated the degree of exposure to the writing systems by testing preschoolers and adults. Participants heard agent-first or recipient-first sentences and were asked to draw the content of the sentences or to arrange transparencies of protagonists and objects such that their arrangement depicted the sentences. Although preschool-age children in both countries showed no directional bias, adults manifested a bias that was consistent with the writing system of their language. These results support the cultural hypothesis regarding the origin of spatial-representational biases.

Domain differences in absolute judgments of category membership: Evidence for an essentialist account of categorization

There has been some debate about the correspondence between typicality gradients and category membership. The present study investigates the relationship between these two measures in the domains of animals and artifacts. Forty-two adults judged the degree of typicality or category membership of 293 animals and artifacts. The subjects’ tendency for animals, but not for artifacts, was to make more absolute ratings on category membership (i.e., judging exemplars as definitely members or definitely not members of their respective category) than on typicality. More importantly, at almost every level of typicality, subjects were more likely to make absolute judgments of category membership for animals than for artifacts. These results indicate that people treat category membership of animals as relatively absolute (which best fits an essentialist model of categorization) and treat category membership of artifacts as relatively graded (which best fits a prototype model of categorization). These domain differences add crucial supporting evidence for claims about the domain-specificity of essentialism.

The evolution of intergroup bias: Perceptions and attitudes in rhesus macaques.

Social psychologists have learned a great deal about the nature of intergroup conflict and the attitudinal and cognitive processes that enable it. Less is known about where these processes come from in the first place. In particular, do our strategies for dealing with other groups emerge in the absence of human-specific experiences? One profitable way to answer this question has involved administering tests that are conceptual equivalents of those used with adult humans in other species, thereby exploring the continuity or discontinuity of psychological processes. We examined intergroup preferences in a nonhuman species, the rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta). We found the first evidence that a nonhuman species automatically distinguishes the faces of members of its own social group from those in other groups and displays greater vigilance toward outgroup members (Experiments 1-3). In addition, we observed that macaques spontaneously associate novel objects with specific social groups and display greater vigilance to objects associated with outgroup members (Experiments 4-5). Finally, we developed a looking time procedure-the Looking Time Implicit Association Test, which resembles the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995)-and we discovered that macaques, like humans, automatically evaluate ingroup members positively and outgroup members negatively (Experiments 6-7). These field studies represent the first controlled experiments to examine the presence of intergroup attitudes in a nonhuman species. As such, these studies suggest that the architecture of the mind that enables the formation of these biases may be rooted in phylogenetically ancient mechanisms.

The Development of Social Essentialism: The Case of Israeli Children's Inferences About Jews and Arabs

Two studies examined the inductive potential of various social categories among 144 kindergarten, 2nd-, and 6th-grade Israeli children from 3 sectors: secular Jews, religious Jews, and Muslim Arabs. Study 1-wherein social categories were labeled-found that ethnic categories were the most inductively powerful, especially for religious Jewish children. Study 2-wherein no social category labels were provided-found no differences across sectors either in the inductive potential of ethnic categories or in childrens capacity to visually recognize social categories. These results stress the importance of labels and cultural background in childrens beliefs about social categories. The implications of these findings for accounts of the development of social essentialism are discussed.

The development of category learning strategies: what makes the difference?

Category learning can be achieved by identifying common features among category members, distinctive features among non-members, or both. These processes are psychologically and computationally distinct, and may have implications for the acquisition of categories at different hierarchical levels. The present study examines an account of childrens difficulty in acquiring categories at the subordinate level grounded on these distinct comparison processes. Adults and children performed category learning tasks in which they were exposed either to pairs of objects from the same novel category or pairs of objects from different categories. The objects were designed so that for each category learning task, two features determined category membership whereas two other features were task irrelevant. In the learning stage participants compared pairs of objects noted to be either from the same category or from different categories. Object pairs were chosen so that the objective amount of information provided to the participants was identical in the two learning conditions. We found that when presented only with object pairs noted to be from the same category, young children (6 < or = YO < or = 9.5) learned the novel categories just as well as older children (10 < or = YO < or = 14) and adults. However, when presented only with object pairs known to be from different categories, unlike older children and adults, young children failed to learn the novel categories. We discuss cognitive and computational factors that may give rise to this comparison bias, as well as its expected outcomes.

The shape of thought

When children learn the name of a novel object, they tend to extend that name to other objects similar in shape - a phenomenon referred to as the shape bias. Does the shape bias stem from learned associations between names and categories of objects, or does it derive from more general properties of childrens understanding of language and the world? We argue here for the second alternative, presenting evidence that the shape bias emerges early in development, is not limited to names, and is intimately related to how children make sense of categories.

God’s categories: The effect of religiosity on children’s teleological and essentialist beliefs about categories☆

Creationism implies that God imbued each category with a unique nature and purpose. These implications closely correspond to what some cognitive psychologists define as an essentialistic and teleological stance towards categories. This study assessed to what extent the belief in God as creator of categories is related to the mappings of these stances to categories in different domains. Israeli secular and orthodox Jewish 1st and 5th graders responded to questions assessing these three types of beliefs. The results revealed that secular children did not differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of animal category membership, and their teleological construal of artifacts. In turn, secular children did differ from orthodox children with respect to their essentialist beliefs about the stability of social category membership, and their teleological construal of both animal and social categories. These findings intimate that while essentialist beliefs about animals, and teleological beliefs about artifacts do not require cultural input in order to emerge, essentialist beliefs about social categories, and teleological beliefs about both animal and social categories do.

Essentialism in Brazilian children's extensions of animal names.

The present study investigates whether Brazilian children have essentialist beliefs about animal categories. Two groups of Brazilian 4-year-olds (middle class and from shantytowns) were told that 2 animals share either internal or superficial properties. They were then taught labels for the animals. Across conditions, children from both groups were equally likely to interpret the labels as referring to mutually exclusive categories of animals, but they differed on how likely they were to maintain an inclusion relation between the labels. More important, children from both groups were more likely to accept a common label for animals sharing internal than superficial properties, indicating that internal property information convinced children that the animals were of the same kind. These findings were comparable to the results of a recent study by G. Diesendruck, S. A. Gelman, and K. Lebowitz (1998) with North American 4-year-olds.