Young children's understanding of phenomena and properties in domains where naive biology and naive psychology interact

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This project aimed at revealing how young children understand properties and phenomena in domains that naive biology and naive psychology interact. The following results were found through a series of studies with individual interview methods.1. Studies dealing with whether young children could differentiate intermediate properties (i.e., physical dispositional, mental dispositional, physical ability, and mental ability properties) in terms of their long-term modifiability and effective means for modifying them indicated that children as young as 5 years of age had robust intuition about the nature of psychological/mental and biological/physical properties ; the more genetically determined the physical property was, the more difficult the children judged it to be able to change, whereas they judged both mental dispositional and mental ability properties as changeable, but they distinguished the mental dispositional from the mental ability in terms of the means for modification ; even when the children were given a small amount of information suggesting either that the target property was innate or that it was due to a lack of specific experience, they did not change their judgments.2. Studies dealing with children's understanding of psychogenic bodily reactions indicated that not only 5-year-olds but also 7-year-olds had difficulty with recognizing that psychological states could lead a person to have bodily physical reactions, though they recognized that a psychological event could cause a behavioral outcome and that a physical event could cause a physical health outcome.