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1. The Scope of Generic Generalizations: Developmental Changes in Judgments about Contextually-Restricted Generics

   Ritchie, Katherine; Curiel, Alejandro; Zhu, Tiffany; Pederneschi, Anna; Vasil, Ny (August 2025, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Barner, David; Bramley, Neil; Ruggeri, Azzurra; Walker, Caren (Ed.)

   Generalizations are powerful tools to convey information agents need to predict and control their environments. However, some generalizations are restricted to “sociocultural bubbles”. How are such patterns communicated? We report one interdisciplinary study — bridging philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive developmental psychology — which examined the developing capacity for contextual restriction of generics in 4- 7-year-olds (N=137) and adults (N=63). We provided context cues signaling that the speaker used a generic generalization to convey a broad vs. contextually-restricted regularity, and measured endorsement of generics attributing properties prevalent globally vs. within “bubbles”. Adults endorsed generics flexibly, tracking context cues, but younger children struggled, over-attributing socially contingent properties to the group beyond the “bubble”, on par with context-general regularities. This reveals a troubling discrepancy between children and adults’ interpretations of generics, opening the door for cross-generational miscommunication. We discuss strategies to mitigate this in educational and family communication settings. 

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2. Experimental sleep loss, racial bias, and the decision criterion to shoot in the Police Officer’s Dilemma task

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77522-z  

   Scullin, Michael K.; Hebl, Michelle R.; Corrington, Abby; Nguyen, Stacy (November 2020, Scientific Reports)

   Abstract Violent behavior, police brutality, and racial discrimination are currently at the forefront of society’s attention, and they should be. We investigated whether mild sleep loss—as typical for many adults throughout the work week—could aggravate the socio-emotional-cognitive processes contributing to violence and discrimination. In a sample of 40 healthy young adults, we either experimentally restricted participants’ sleep for four nights (6.2 h/night) or let participants obtain normal sleep (7.7 h/night)—and then had them complete the Police Officer’s Dilemma Task. In this computerized task, the participant must rapidly decide to shoot or not shoot at White and Black men who either are or are not holding a gun. Results showed significant racial biases, including more and quicker shooting of Black targets compared to White targets. Furthermore, signal detection analyses demonstrated that mild sleep restriction changed participants’ decision criterion, increasing the tendency to shoot, even when controlling for psychomotor vigilance, fluid intelligence, and self-reported desirability to behave in a socially acceptable manner. The increased tendency to shoot was also observed in participants who reported believing that they had adapted to the sleep loss. Future experimental research using trained police officers will help establish the generalizability of these laboratory effects. Importantly, sleep loss is modifiable via organization-level changes (e.g., shift scheduling, light entrainment) and individual-level interventions (e.g., sleep hygiene education, incentives for behavioral change), suggesting that if sleep loss is corrected, it could save lives—including Black lives. 

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3. Children’s and Adults’ Perceptions of Religious and Secular Interventions for Incarcerated Individuals in the United States

   https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14070821  

   Cohen, Aaron; Dunlea, James P.; Solomon, Larisa Heiphetz (July 2023, Religions)

   Religious involvement is prevalent in prisons, a context where questions of moral redemption are particularly salient. We probed the developmental origins of adults’ perceptions that religion might lead to redemption following transgressions. Six- to eight-year-olds (n = 50 United States residents) and adults (n = 53 United States residents) learned about incarcerated characters who had taken religion classes, art classes, or life classes (about right and wrong) while imprisoned. They then rated their agreement with statements assessing attitudes toward the incarcerated individuals, the effectiveness of each character’s time in prison, and their likelihood of recidivism. Children were more likely than adults to report that classes, in general, would effectively rehabilitate incarcerated individuals. However, participants of all ages reported more positive attitudes toward people who took religion classes and life classes rather than art classes. Further, participants of all ages reported that people who took art classes, versus religion or life classes, would be more likely to continue transgressing. These findings highlight the important role that religious and secular learning plays in perceptions of redemption across development. 

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4. Not All Procedural Learning Tasks Are Difficult for Adults With Developmental Language Disorder

   https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00548  

   Gerken, LouAnn; Plante, Elena; Goffman, Lisa (March 2021, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research)

   null (Ed.)

   Purpose The experiment reported here compared two hypotheses for the poor statistical and artificial grammar learning often seen in children and adults with developmental language disorder (DLD; also known as specific language impairment). The procedural learning deficit hypothesis states that implicit learning of rule-based input is impaired, whereas the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis states that poor performance is only seen when learners must implicitly compute sequential dependencies. The current experiment tested learning of an artificial grammar that could be learned via feature activation, as observed in an associatively organized lexicon, without computing sequential dependencies and should therefore be learnable on the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis, but not on the procedural learning deficit hypothesis. Method Adults with DLD and adults with typical language development (TD) listened to consonant–vowel–consonant–vowel familiarization words from one of two artificial phonological grammars: Family Resemblance (two out of three features) and a control (exclusive OR, in which both consonants are voiced OR both consonants are voiceless) grammar in which no learning was predicted for either group. At test, all participants rated 32 test words as to whether or not they conformed to the pattern in the familiarization words. Results Adults with DLD and adults with TD showed equal and robust learning of the Family Resemblance grammar, accepting significantly more conforming than nonconforming test items. Both groups who were familiarized with the Family Resemblance grammar also outperformed those who were familiarized with the OR grammar, which, as predicted, was learned by neither group. Conclusion Although adults and children with DLD often underperform, compared to their peers with TD, on statistical and artificial grammar learning tasks, poor performance appears to be tied to the implicit computation of sequential dependencies, as predicted by the sequential pattern learning deficit hypothesis. 

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5. Children’s socio-moral reasoning about vaccine-like behaviors

   https://doi.org/10.1177/13591053251314684  

   Probst, Sarah; Warneken, Felix (February 2025, Journal of Health Psychology)

   Framing public-health behaviors as benefiting others, rather than the self, can increase behavior uptake in adults. However, there are mixed results on the effects of such messaging in a vaccination context, and it is unclear how children reason about the social and moral implications of vaccination. In this study, we present school-aged children ( N = 60) with hypothetical vaccine-like behaviors and manipulate whether they benefit the self or others, and whether they prevent low or high severity harm. We find that children readily endorse these behaviors when they prevent high severity harm, and that the beneficiary of the behavior does not impact children’s endorsement. Younger children thought vaccine-like behaviors were morally important regardless of who they protected; However, as children get older, they thought about the vaccine-like behaviors in moral terms when they protected others. We discuss potential implications for how communications about vaccination may impact children’s reasoning about others. 

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