Early Domain-Specific Knowledge? Nonlinear Developmental Trajectories Further Erode a House of Sand

Rakison and Yermolayeva (this issue) argue that domain specificity is difficult to reconcile with U-, N-, or M-shaped developmental trends. They are justified because: 1) There is no compelling evidence that nonlinear trends require mechanisms beyond general, well-known cognitive processes; and 2) epigenetic neuroscience provides no clear evidence of strong domain-specialized representations. Evidence implies pervasive weak (i.e., experience dependent) neural specialization for different kinds of information. © 2011 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Young children's flexible use of semantic cues to word meanings: converging evidence of individual and age differences

A new test of children’s flexible use of semantic cues for word learning extended previous results. In Experiment 1, three- to five-year-olds (N=51) completed two tests of interpreting several novel words for the same stimulus arrays. Within-sentence phrasal cues implied different stimulus referent properties. Children’s cue-using flexibility in the new Flexible Induction of Meanings [Words for Animates] test (FIM-An) was strongly correlated with an established test (Flexible Induction of Meanings [Words for Objects] ; Deak, 2000). Individual children showed between-test consistency in using cues to flexibly assign words to different referent properties. There were large individual differences, as well as limited age differences, in the distribution of flexible and inflexible response patterns. The comprehensibility of specific cues, and perceptual salience of specific properties, explained much of the variance. Proportions of flexible and inflexible patterns shifted with age. Experiment 2 replicated these results in N=36 three- and four-year-olds, using a modified FIM-An with more distinctive cues

Intensity of Caring About an Action’s Side-Effect Mediates Attributions of Actor’s Intentions

The side-effect effect (SEE) is the observation that people’s intuition about whether an action was intentional depends on whether the outcome is good or bad. The asymmetric response, however, does not represent all subjects’ judgments (Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007). It remains unexplored on subjective factors that can mediate the size of SEE. Thus, the current study investigated whether an individual related factor, specifically, whether adults’ intensity of caring about an outcome of someone’s actions influences their judgments about whether that person intended the outcome. We hypothesized that participants’ judgments about fictional agents’ responsibility for their action’s side-effects would depend on how much they care about the domain of the side-effect. In two experiments, the intensity of caring affected participants’ ascription of intention to an agent’s negative unintended side-effect. The stronger ascription of intentionality to negative than positive side-effects (i.e., the SEE; Knobe, 2003) was found only in domains in which participants reported higher levels of caring. Also, the intensity of caring increased intentionality attributions reliably for negative side-effects but not for positive side-effects. These results suggest that caring about a domain mediates an asymmetrical ascription of intentionality to negative more than positive side-effects