Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children's Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts
Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children's Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts
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DOI：
10.1111/cogs.12037
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发表时间：
2013-09-01
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Spelke, Elizabeth S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Banerjee, Konika;Haque, Omar S.;Spelke, Elizabeth S.
之前对成年人的研究表明，超自然或宗教概念背后的最低限度反直觉概念目录可能构成认知最佳状态，因此比完全直觉的概念或最大限度反直觉的概念更成功地进行认知编码和文化传播。本研究探讨是否儿童的概念回忆同样是敏感的程度的概念反直觉（操作作为一个概念的本体论域侵犯的数量）的项目中提出的一个虚构的叙述。7 ~ 9岁的儿童在听完一个既包含直觉概念又包含反直觉概念的故事后，无论是在听完故事后的即刻还是一周后，都能回忆起包含一个（实验1）或两个（实验2），但不是三个（实验3）的反直觉概念，这些概念违反直觉本体论期望的次数和细节明显多于直觉概念。我们的结论是，一个或两个违反的期望可能是一个最佳的认知儿童：他们是更inquiry丰富，因此更难忘，而三个或三个以上的违规行为减少记忆的目标概念。这些结果表明，对最低限度违反直觉的想法的认知偏见是存在的，并在人类发展的早期活跃，接近正式宗教教育的开始。这一发现支持了越来越多的文献，这些文献表明，多样的、早期出现的、进化的心理偏见使人类倾向于持有和执行宗教信仰和实践，其主要形式和内容不仅仅来自武断的习俗或社会环境。
Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven- to nine-year-old children who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early-emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone.