More Like this

1. Contextual Restriction and Faultless Disagreement about Generics across Development

   Vasil, Ny; Campos, Gaia; Rouzbehani, Bahar; Curiel, Alejandro; Caoile, Jason; Khurelkhuu, Suren; Ritchie, Katherine (August 2025, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society)

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

   We report a study examining developmental changes in perceptions of disagreements among speakers who use generics to describe contextually-restricted or unrestricted regularities. Participants (65 adults and 222 5-12-year-olds) reacted to generic claims from two speakers who attributed ostensibly contradictory properties to a biological kind (e.g. “Xs are striped” and “Xs are spotted”). Crucially, we manipulated the scope of each speaker’s claim, or its contextual restriction: whether they made a claim restricted to a specific context (island habitat), or an unrestricted claim. Participants were asked whether the speakers could “both be right” (faultless disagreement rating). Adults were sensitive to contextual restriction: they allowed for faultless disagreement when contextual restrictions mis-aligned (with additional differentiation among experimental conditions described below), and denied it when both speakers restricted to the same context. Young children demonstrated striking partial competence in faultless disagreement judgments much earlier than prior developmental literature suggested; however, their response pattern was not quite adult-like. This is the first study to document faultless disagreement between differentially restricted generics, both in adults and in children, and to start mapping developmental changes in this capacity. We discuss the developmental trajectory, and implications for social functioning and learning, and draw connections to semantic theories. 

   more » « less
2. How many observations is one generic worth?

   Tessler, Michael Henry; Bridgers, Sophie; Tenenbaum, Joshua B. (January 2020, Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Generic language (e.g., “Birds fly”) conveys generalizations about categories and is essential for learning beyond our direct experience. The meaning of generic language is notoriously hard to specify, however (e.g., penguins don’t fly). Tessler and Goodman (2019) proposed a model for generics that is mathematically equivalent to Bayesian belief-updating based on a single pedagogical example, suggesting a deep connection be- tween learning from experience and learning from language. Relatedly, Csibra and Shamsudheen (2015) argue that generics are inherently pedagogical, understood by infants as referring to a member of a kind. In two experiments with adults, we quantify the exchange-rate between generics and observations by relating their belief-updating capacity, varying both the number of observations and whether they are presented pedagogically or incidentally. We find generics convey stronger generalizations than single pedagogical observations (Expt. 1), even when the property is explicitly demarcated (Expt. 2). We suggest revisions to the vague quantifier model of generics that would allow it to accommodate this intriguing exchange-rate. 

   more » « less
3. “Oh! Um. . . Sure”: Children and adults use other’s linguistic surprisal to reason about expectations and learn stereotypes

   Morris, B; Shaw, A (July 2024, Cognitive Science Society)

   While people may be reluctant to explicitly state social stereotypes, their underlying beliefs may nonetheless leak out in subtler conversational cues, such as surprisal reactions that convey information about expectations. Across 3 experiments with adults and children (ages 4-9), we compare permissive responses ("Sure, you can have that one") that vary the presence of surprisal cues (interjections "oh!" and disfluencies "um"). In Experiment 1 (n = 120), children by 6-to-7 use surprisal reactions to infer that a boy more likely made a counter-stereotypical choice. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that these cues are sufficient for children (n = 120) and adults (n = 80) to learn a novel expectation about a group of aliens. In Experiment 3, adults (n = 150) use the distribution of surprisal information to infer whether a novel behavior is gender-stereotyped. Across these experiments, we see emerging evidence that conversational feedback may provide a crucial and unappreciated avenue for the transmission of social beliefs. 

   more » « less
4. When generic language does not promote psychological essentialism.

   Vasilyeva, N.; Gopnik, A.; Lombrozo, T. (January 2020, Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society)

   Denison, Stephanie; Mack, Michael; Xu, Yang; Armstrong, Blair C. (Ed.)

   Generic language (e.g., “Women are nurturing”; “Women do not like math”) is prominent in child-directed speech, and has been shown to promote essentialist beliefs about the relevant kind, supporting stereotyping and prejudice. Here we investigate a theoretically-motivated intervention to break the link between generics and essentialist assumptions. In a study with 223 3-8-year-old children who learned about novel social groups from generic language, we demonstrate that a structural construal of generics (attributing the category-property association to stable external constraints) mitigates essentialist assumptions about social categories. We discuss practical applications for reducing stereotype endorsement, and theoretical implications regarding the meaning of generic language and the development of social kind representations. 

   more » « less
5. Improving Memory Search Through Model-Based Cue Selection

   https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231215298  

   Cornell, Charlotte_A; Norman, Kenneth_A; Griffiths, Thomas_L; Zhang, Qiong (January 2024, Psychological Science)

   We often use cues from our environment when we get stuck searching our memories, but prior research has failed to show benefits of cuing with other, randomly selected list items during memory search. What accounts for this discrepancy? We proposed that cues’ content critically determines their effectiveness and sought to select the right cues by building a computational model of how cues affect memory search. Participants ( N = 195 young adults from the United States) recalled significantly more items when receiving our model’s best (vs. worst) cue. Our model provides an account of why some cues better aid recall: Effective cues activate contexts most similar to the remaining items’ contexts, facilitating recall in an unsearched area of memory. We discuss our contributions in relation to prominent theories about the effect of external cues. 

   more » « less