Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation

Research in object recognition has tried to distinguish holistic recognition from recognition by parts. One can also guess an object from its context. Words are objects, and how we recognize them is the core question of reading research. Do fast readers rely most on letter-by-letter decoding (i.e., recognition by parts), whole word shape, or sentence context? We manipulated the text to selectively knock out each source of information while sparing the others. Surprisingly, the effects of the knockouts on reading rate reveal a triple dissociation. Each reading process always contributes the same number of words per minute, regardless of whether the other processes are operating

The demographics of pain: How age, race, and gender affect pain assessments

Prior studies indicate that sex, race, and age biases in assumed pain sensitivity produce treatment disparities: Women are seen as more sensitive than men; white people as more sensitive than Black people; and both seniors and infants are deprioritized. We recruited online participants (N=69) to assess fictional characters’ pain in 8 scenarios. Characters varied in sex (male/female), race (Black/white), age (adult/child), and injury (e.g., bruised leg, splinter). Using a mixed effects regression, we found an effect of character age (p<0.01) and a marginal effect of character sex (p=0.08). These results suggest that adults assume children feel more pain than adults. Additionally, we found that male participants rated female characters’ pain as higher than male characters’ pain (p<0.01), whereas female participants rated male and female pain equally. Also, white participants gave lower pain ratings overall than nonwhite participants (p<0.01). In sum, character and participant demographics both affected pain assessment outcomes

Do humans have intuitive theories of time?

Children have intuitive theories of several conceptual domains, but it is unknown if adults’ common sense beliefs about time reflect an intuitive theory. Here, in an online survey, 165 3- to 6-year-old children judged whether 13 time-related phenomena (e.g., the future, going back in time) were real or not real and provided confidence ratings for their judgments. Beforehand, parents provided their own responses to the same items and predicted their children’s responses. As early as age 3, children’s responses to most items resembled those of adults. Children’s responses to past-related items (e.g. changing the past) were more similar to adults’ than were their responses to future-related items (e.g., changing the future). Parents predicted their children’s responses with high accuracy. These results suggest that many, but not all, adult beliefs about time emerge early in development, and may be part of an intuitive theory

You can't change the past: Children’s recognition of the causal asymmetry between past and future events

Children’s temporal and causal reasoning skills improve substantially during early childhood, but it remains unclear when they fully understand the conceptual distinction between the past and the future. Here we explored U.S. 3- to 6-year-old children’s (n = 228) and adults’ (n = 60) understanding that acting in the present can change the future but not the past. To do so, we told participants 3-step causal stories, e.g., “(1) When Sally flips the light switch, (2) the light turns on, (3) so she can see to find her toy,” and asked about the effects of an action at event 2, e.g., “What if John turned off the light?”. When asked about the effects of the change on the future consequent event (3), only 3-year-olds responded at chance, while 4- to 6-year-olds became increasingly likely to judge that the future event would also change. However, when asked about the effects of the change on the past antecedent event (1), children of all ages, like adults, consistently judged that the past event still occurred. This suggests that children have an early-developing understanding that the past cannot be changed. Using a similar paradigm, we also explored children’s reasoning about the implications of the non-occurrence of event 2, in which the cause was not specified, e.g., “What if the light didn’t turn on?”. Both children and adults reasoned differently about these scenarios than they did about those involving actions by external agents. In particular, adults and 6-year-olds inferred that the antecedent event also had not occurred. Implications for theoretical accounts of causal and temporal reasoning are discussed

Children's spontaneous inferences about time and causality in language

Language is powerful in part because it can communicate about causal and temporal relations that are otherwise not perceptually available: A speaker can say “After the man got sick, he ate chicken soup”, and an adult listener can infer — without any perceptual evidence of the events discussed — that the illness preceded (and possibly caused) the eating. What information do children use to determine the causal and temporal relations between clauses? We explored the roles of (a) connectives like before and because, (b) the chronology of events and clauses, and (c) world knowledge in informing children's inferences about linguistically presented causal and temporal relations. In two experiments, we presented children (Exp. 1: N = 139 3- to 7-year-olds; Exp. 2: N = 81 4- to 5-year-olds) with sentences containing two events linked by a connective (Exp. 1: because, and so; Exp. 2: before, after). We then unexpectedly asked them to retell the “stories” from memory, to see what temporal and causal relations they had spontaneously encoded. We found that children overwhelmingly reproduced the causal and temporal relations from the original sentences. When they didn’t, it was often because the original sentence had not been described chronologically, or the primed causal relations were inconsistent with children’s knowledge of the real world. Finally, the fidelity of children’s retellings depended both on the connective they heard and its positioning in the sentence. These data suggest that children integrate multiple cues to interpret the causal and temporal relations presented in language

The development of preferences for conventional linear representations of temporal events

When thinking about time, English-speaking adults often spontaneously recruit a “mental timeline” (MTL) representing events sequentially along a linear path from left to right (LR). The origins of the MTL are debated, but cross-cultural differences in the direction and orientation of the timeline suggest that factors such as writing direction play an important role in shaping it. Here, we explore the developmental emergence of the mental timeline by asking whether pre-literate children prefer linear representations of sequential temporal events, and if so, whether they specifically prefer LR representations of temporal narratives. English-speaking adults and 3- to 5-year-old preschoolers were told 3-step stories (e.g., “First there was an egg, then the egg hatched, and a baby chick came out!”) and then asked to choose which of two triplets of images best illustrated the story. Results indicate that, given scaffolding, 3- and 4-year-old children preferred LR to unordered horizontal sequences, and 4-year-olds also preferred top-to-bottom (TB) to unordered vertical sequences. However, preferences between directions – for LR over right-to-left and TB, and for TB over bottom-to-top – emerged later, and in tandem, around age 5. Together, these results show that directional biases in space-time mappings are shaped gradually in childhood, and are not initially LR-specific. Moreover, preliminary data suggest that children’s preferences for conventional linear representations of time are correlated with their emergent writing skills, suggesting that literacy is key to the development of the MTL

Children’s causal inferences about past vs. future events

Causal and temporal reasoning are fundamentally linked, butfew studies have directly examined how the ability to makecausal inferences about the past vs. the future develops. We useda counterfactual reasoning task to explore 4- to 6-year-oldchildren’s understanding of the causal relationships among past,present, and future events. Like adults, even 4-year-olds judgedthat future, but not past, events could be altered by interventionsin the present. This early sensitivity to the causal asymmetrybetween the past and future became more pronounced with age.We also found that children and adults selectively andappropriately use evidence about the present to make inferencesabout past events. Implications for theoretical accounts of thedevelopment of causal reasoning and abstract concepts of timeare discussed

Children gradually construct spatial representations of temporal events

English-speaking adults often recruit a “mental timeline” to represent events from left-to-right, but its developmental origins are debated. Here, we test whether preschoolers prefer linear representations of events and whether they prefer culturally-conventional directions. English-speaking adults (n = 85) and 3-to-5-year-olds (n = 513; 50% female; ~47% white, ~35% Latinx, ~18% other) were told 3-step stories and asked to choose which of two image sequences best illustrated them. We found that 3- and 4-year-olds chose ordered over unordered sequences (r 3yo = 0.29, r 4yo = 0.74), but preferences between directions did not emerge until age 5 (r 5yo = 0.37, r adult = 0.91). Together, these results show that children conceptualize time linearly early in development but gradually acquire directional preferences (e.g., for left-to-right)

Stay away, Santa: Children’s beliefs about the impact of COVID-19 on real and fictional beings

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children’s theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We explored these questions in the context of children’s beliefs about supernatural beings, like Santa and the Tooth Fairy. Because these beings cannot be observed, children’s beliefs about the impact of COVID-19 on them must be based on their underlying theories of disease transmission and prevention rather than on experience. In Summer of 2020, N = 218 U.S. children between the ages of 3 and 10 (M = 81.2 months) were asked to rate supernatural beings’ susceptibility to COVID-19, and the extent to which these beings should engage in disease-mitigating behaviors, such as social distancing and mask wearing. Many children believed supernatural beings were susceptible to COVID-19. However, children rated the need for supernatural beings to engage in disease-mitigating behaviors as higher than the beings’ disease susceptibility, indicating a disconnect between their conceptions of the causal relations between disease-mitigating behavior and disease prevention. Children’s belief that a particular supernatural being could be impacted by COVID-19 was best predicted by the number of human-like properties they attributed to it, regardless of the child’s age. Together, these findings suggest that although young children fail to appreciate specific pathways of disease transmission, they nonetheless understand disease as a bodily affliction, even for beings whose bodies have never been observed