Cog Neuro FriSem

Kara Weisman, Graduate Student, Stanford University, Department of Psychology

Charting changes in conceptual structure: The development of reasoning about mental life between 4-9 years of age

How do children come to make sense of the many emotions, sensations, and cognitive abilities that make up mental life? Taking into account intuitive ontologies of mental life could be critical for making sense of children’s developing understanding of the human, animal, and technological “beings” in the modern world. In a series of large-scale studies, we investigated 4- to 9-year-old children’s and adults’ attributions of a wide range of mental capacities to various target characters, including mammals, birds, insects, technologies, and toys. Our goal was to assess which attributions “go together”: e.g., if someone says that a robot can remember things, what else do they say a robot can do? This allowed us to reconstruct the latent structure underlying mental capacity judgments from the bottom up—a powerful and underutilized means of elucidating conceptual structure at different points in development. In this talk, I will also introduce a new analytical approach that aims to extend these analyses to chart conceptual changes continuously across early and middle childhood.