Facts in counterfactuals-cognitive representations of Chinese counterfactuals.

How do people represent counterfactuals? As languages differ in expressibility of counterfactuals-some languages employ explicit grammatical marking for counterfactuals while others do not-are some speakers' representations of counterfactuals less explicit? Prior studies examining this question with Chinese speakers-a language devoid of explicit counterfactual markings-found mixed results. Here we re-examined the issue by using a more sensitive test: people's sensitivity to detect anomalies in sentences. We asked Chinese speakers to rate the acceptability of sentences employing "ruguo (if)…jiu (then)" configuration-the typical but non-unique, non-explicit marking of counterfactuals. Critically, we varied the semantic adherence to real-world facts [factuality], with some sentences containing made-up conditions [-fact as in "If fish had legs, then…"] versus real facts [+ fact: "If dogs had legs, then…"]. If speakers represent counterfactuals clearly, they should give higher acceptability ratings to [- facts] than to [+ facts] sentences, because the ostensible point of counterfactuals is to express non-factual situations. That is, expressing a true fact under a syntactic counterfactual construction makes the sentence anomalous. Instead, we found that Chinese speakers gave the opposite ratings: factual "if…then" sentences were rated as more acceptable than non-factual ones. This suggests that Chinese speakers find the processing of counterfactuals to be more challenging than processing facts, and that their representation of counterfactuals may be less explicit. Overall, this research contributes to our understanding of the link between linguistic markings and cognitive representations.

Developmental changes in drawing production under different memory demands in a U.S. and Chinese sample.

Children's drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across childhood. What are the major factors that drive developmental changes in children's drawings? To what degree are children's drawings a product of their changing internal category representations versus limited by their visuomotor abilities or their ability to recall the relevant visual information? To explore these questions, we examined the degree to which developmental changes in drawing recognizability vary across different drawing tasks that vary in memory demands (i.e., drawing from verbal vs. picture cues) and with children's shape-tracing abilities across two geographical locations (San Jose, United States, and Beijing, China). We collected digital shape tracings and drawings of common object categories (e.g., cat, airplane) from 4- to 9-year-olds (N = 253). The developmental trajectory of drawing recognizability was remarkably similar when children were asked to draw from pictures versus verbal cues and across these two geographical locations. In addition, our Beijing sample produced more recognizable drawings but showed similar tracing abilities to children from San Jose. Overall, this work suggests that the developmental trajectory of children's drawings is remarkably consistent and not easily explainable by changes in visuomotor control or working memory; instead, changes in children's drawings over development may at least partly reflect changes in the internal representations of object categories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Mommy, Can I Play Outside? How Urban Design Influences Parental Attitudes on Play.

Although play results in physical, social, and cognitive benefits, there is a consensus that children's opportunities to play have been reduced, particularly for those who live in urban environments. What are the barriers to play, and how can we mitigate them? This review examines a critical factor in play opportunities: parents as the decision-makers with regard to children's play. Using perspectives from psychology, urban design, and cognitive science, we analyze the relationships between the design of built environments, parental attitudes and beliefs, and parental decisions on allowing children to play. For example, can a new implementation of children-centered urban design change parents' skeptical attitude toward play? By drawing from global studies, we chart (1) the three key beliefs of parents regarding play and built environments: play should benefit learning, be safe, and match the child's competence and (2) the design principles that can foster these beliefs: learning, social, and progressive challenge designs. By making the link between parents, urban design, and play explicit, this paper aims to inform parents, educators, policymakers, urban planners, and architects on the evidence-based measures for creating and increasing opportunities to play.

Diversity vs. ingroup: How children generalize for the common good.

How do children generalize for the common good? The present study investigated whether children are more likely to use the preference of their ingroup (ingroup rationale) or that of a diverse group (diversity rationale) as a basis for generalization about the broader community. In a series of studies, five-year-olds from two different cultures (US and China), yet living in environments with analogous ingroup majority-outgroup minority structure, were asked to generalize either the preference of a diverse sample or the preference of an ingroup sample to the majority. We found that children from both cultures have a default strategy to generalize from their ingroup (Study 1). However, Studies 2-4 show that this ingroup default is amenable to change, suggesting that children mostly use this strategy because ingroup members were salient and conveniently available. When ingroup was removed or reduced (Study 2), or when primed with photos of diverse populations (Studies 3 & 4), children changed their strategies and were more likely to use the diversity-rationale. In both cultures, the intergroup structure of children's living environment exerts similar pressures, resulting in analogous outcomes in generalizing for the common good.

Structure Mapping for Social Learning.

Analogical reasoning is a foundational tool for human learning, allowing learners to recognize relational structures in new events and domains. Here I sketch some grounds for understanding and applying analogical reasoning in social learning. The social world is fundamentally characterized by relations between people, with common relational structures-such as kinships and social hierarchies-forming social units that dictate social behaviors. Just as young learners use analogical reasoning for learning relational structures in other domains-spatial relations, verbs, relational categories-analogical reasoning ought to be a useful cognitive tool for acquiring social relations and structures.

Children Prefer Diverse Samples for Inductive Reasoning in the Social Domain.

Not all samples of evidence are equally conclusive: Diverse evidence is more representative than narrow evidence. Prior research showed that children did not use sample diversity in evidence selection tasks, indiscriminately choosing diverse or narrow sets (tiger-mouse; tiger-lion) to learn about animals. This failure is not due to a general deficit of inductive reasoning, but reflects children's belief about the category and property at test. Five- to 7 year-olds' inductive reasoning (n = 65) was tested in two categories (animal, people) and properties (toy preference, biological property). As stated earlier, children ignored diverse evidence when learning about animals' biological properties. When learning about people's toy preferences, however, children selected the diverse samples, providing the most compelling evidence to date of spontaneous selection of diverse evidence.

Sensitivity to Relational Similarity and Object Similarity in Apes and Children.

Relational reasoning is a hallmark of sophisticated cognition in humans. Does it exist in other primates? Despite some affirmative answers, there appears to be a wide gap in relational ability between humans and other primates--even other apes. Here, we test one possible explanation for this gap, motivated by developmental research showing that young humans often fail at relational reasoning tasks because they focus on objects instead of relations. When asked, "duck:duckling is like tiger:?," preschool children choose another duckling (object match) rather than a cub. If other apes share this focus on concrete objects, it could undermine their relational reasoning in similar ways. To test this, we compared great apes and 3-year-old humans' relational reasoning on the same spatial mapping task, with and without competing object matches. Without competing object matches, both children and Pan species (chimpanzees and bonobos) spontaneously used relational similarity, albeit children more so. But when object matches were present, only children responded strongly to them. We conclude that the relational gap is not due to great apes' preference for concrete objects. In fact, young humans show greater object focus than nonhuman apes.

Language helps children succeed on a classic analogy task.

Adult humans show exceptional relational ability relative to other species. In this research, we trace the development of this ability in young children. We used a task widely used in comparative research-the relational match-to-sample task, which requires participants to notice and match the identity relation: for example, AA should match BB instead of CD. Despite the simplicity of this relation, children under 4 years of age failed to pass this test (Experiment 1), and their performance did not improve even with initial feedback (Experiment 2). In Experiments 3 and 4, we found that two kinds of symbolic-linguistic experience can facilitate relational reasoning in young children. Our findings suggest that children learn to become adept analogical thinkers, and that language fosters this learning in at least two distinct ways.

Infants make quantity discriminations for substances.

Infants can track small groups of solid objects, and infants can respond when these quantities change. But earlier work is equivocal about whether infants can track continuous substances, such as piles of sand. Experiment 1 (N = 88) used a habituation paradigm to show infants can register changes in the size of piles of sand that they see poured from a container when there is a 1-to-4 ratio. Experiment 2 (N = 82) tested whether infants could discriminate a 1-to-2 ratio. The results demonstrate that females could discriminate the difference but males could not. These findings constitute the youngest evidence of successful quantity discriminations for a noncohesive substance and begin to characterize the nature of the representation for noncohesive entities.

Four types of visual mental imagery processing in upright and tilted observers.

We investigated the role of body position on performance in four distinct types of mental imagery processing. Previous studies used the upright body position as standard procedure and therefore do not address the issue of whether mental imagery tasks are processed in accordance with ego-centered or gravitational coordinates. In the present study, the subjects were brought into one of three different body positions: upright, horizontal, or supine. In each of these body positions, we measured performance in four imagery tasks, which assessed (1) the ability to generate vivid, high-resolution mental images; (2) the ability to compose mental images from separate parts; (3) the ability to inspect patterns in mental images; and, (4) the ability to mentally rotate patterns in images. Not all processes were affected in the same way when subjects performed them in different body positions. Performance in the image composition and detection tasks depended on body position, whereas there was no such effect for the transformation and resolution tasks.