Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions

Cognitive flexibility, the adaptation of representations and responses to new task demands, improves dramatically in early childhood. It is unclear, however, whether flexibility is a coherent, unitary cognitive trait, or is an emergent dimension of task-specific performance that varies across populations with divergent experiences. Three-to 5-year-old English-speaking U.S. children and Tswana-speaking South African children completed two distinct language-processing cognitive flexibility tests: the FIM-Animates, a word-learning test, and the 3DCCS, a rule-switching test. U.S. and South African children did not differ in word-learning flexibility but showed similar age-related increases. In contrast, U.S. preschoolers showed an age-related increase in rule-switching flexibility but South African children did not. Verbal recall explained additional variance in both tests but did not modulate the interaction between population sample (i.e., country) and task. We hypothesize that rule-switching flexibility might be more dependent upon particular kinds of cultural experiences, whereas word-learning flexibility is less cross-culturally variable

The Development of Casual Explanatory Reasoning.

Young children actively seek to understand the world around them; they construct causal explanations for how and why things happen. The early-developing capacity for causal explanatory reasoning raises several questions: How do children assemble causal-explanatory systems of knowledge? What motivates children to construct causal explanations? What can the kinds of events that trigger causal explanatory reasoning tell us about the function of children’s explanations? In a series of studies with preschool children, contrastive outcomes were used as an experimental paradigm for studying the kinds of events that provoke children’s causal explanations. In Study 1 (N=48, age range 3,2 to 5,6) and Study 2 (N=32, age range 3,0 to 4,11), in order to investigate two competing hypotheses about the function of children’s explanations, events that were inconsistent with children’s prior knowledge were simultaneously contrasted with events that were consistent with children’s prior knowledge. Results suggest that inconsistent outcomes are an especially powerful trigger for children’s explanations, and that children provide explanations for inconsistent outcomes that refer to underlying, internal causal properties, overriding perceptual appearances. Study 3(N=28 children, age range 3,1 to 5,2; N=16 adults) specifically targeted state-change and negative outcomes as additional kinds of explanatory triggers, within a knowledge-rich context (illness). In Study 3, preschool children’s causal reasoning about illness was investigated, specifically, their explanations for preventing illness versus curing illness. Results indicate that state-change and negative outcomes provoke children’s causal explanations. As predicted, illness prevention provokes explanations less often than illness cure or treatment. In sum, data provide evidence for the interplay of three distinct, but interrelated biases that guide children’s causal explanatory reasoning. The data also provide insight into the function of children’s explanations and empirical evidence for the kinds of events that motivate children to construct explanations.Ph.D.PsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60717/1/chlegare_1.pd

Anthropomorphizing Science: How Does It Affect the Development of Evolutionary Concepts?

Despite the ubiquitous use of anthropomorphic language to describe biological change in both educational settings and popular science, little is known about how anthropomorphic language influences children’s understanding of evolutionary concepts. In an experimental study, we assessed whether the language used to convey evolutionary concepts influences children’s (5- to 12-year-olds; N = 88) understanding of evolutionary change. Language was manipulated by using three types of narrative, each describing animals’ biological change: (a) need-based narratives, which referenced animals’ basic survival needs; (b) desire-based or anthropomorphic narratives, which referenced animals’ mental states; and (c) scientifically accurate natural selection narratives. Results indicate that the language used to describe evolutionary change influenced children’s endorsement of and use of evolutionary concepts when interpreting that change. Narratives using anthropomorphic language were least likely to facilitate a scientifically accurate interpretation. In contrast, need-based and natural selection language had similar and positive effects, which suggests that need-based reasoning might provide a conceptual scaffold to an evolutionary explanation of biological origins. In sum, the language used to teach evolutionary change impacts conceptual understanding in children and has important pedagogical implications for science education

The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: a call to action

Abstract: Psychology must confront the bias in its broad literature towards the study of participants developing in environments unrepresentative of the vast majority of the world’s population. Here, we focus on the implications of addressing this challenge, highlight the need to address over-reliance on a narrow participant pool, and emphasize the value and necessity of conducting research with diverse populations. We show that high impact-factor developmental journals are heavily skewed towards publishing papers with data from WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Most critically, despite calls for change and supposed widespread awareness of this problem, there is a habitual dependence on convenience sampling and little evidence that the discipline is making any meaningful movement towards drawing from diverse samples. Failure to confront the possibility that culturally-specific findings are being misattributed as universal traits has broad implications for the construction of scientifically defensible theories and for the reliable public dissemination of study findings

Cognitive flexibility supports the development of cumulative cultural learning in children

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Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths.

Hearing the voice of God, feeling the presence of the dead, being possessed by a demonic spirit-such events are among the most remarkable human sensory experiences. They change lives and in turn shape history. Why do some people report experiencing such events while others do not? We argue that experiences of spiritual presence are facilitated by cultural models that represent the mind as "porous," or permeable to the world, and by an immersive orientation toward inner life that allows a person to become "absorbed" in experiences. In four studies with over 2,000 participants from many religious traditions in the United States, Ghana, Thailand, China, and Vanuatu, porosity and absorption played distinct roles in determining which people, in which cultural settings, were most likely to report vivid sensory experiences of what they took to be gods and spirits.Templeton Foundatio

Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties

Four experiments with preschool-aged children test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation promotes inductive reasoning on the basis of shared causal properties as opposed to salient (but superficial) perceptual properties. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 3- to 5-year-old children prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to perceptual similarity and instead extend an internal feature to an object that shared a causal property. Experiment 2 replicated this effect of explanation in a case of label extension (i.e., categorization). Experiment 3 demonstrated that explanation improves memory for clusters of causally relevant (non-perceptual) features, but impairs memory for superficial (perceptual) features, providing evidence that effects of explanation are selective in scope and apply to memory as well as inference. In sum, our data support the proposal that engaging in explanation influences children's reasoning by privileging inductively rich, causal properties