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29History and essence in human cognitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (2). 2013.Bullot & Reber (B&R) provide compelling evidence that sensitivity to context, history, and design stance are crucial to theories of art appreciation. We ask how these ideas relate to broader aspects of human cognition. Further open questions concern how psychological essentialism contributes to art appreciation and how essentialism regarding created artifacts (such as art) differs from essentialism in other domains
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28The Essential Child:Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday ThoughtOxford Series in Cognitive Development. 2003.Essentialism is the idea that certain categories, such as "dog," "man," or "intelligence," have an underlying reality or true nature that gives objects their identity. Where does this idea come from? In this book, Susan Gelman argues that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category memb…Read more
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27Picasso Paintings, Moon Rocks, and Hand-Written Beatles Lyrics: Adults' Evaluations of Authentic ObjectsJournal of Cognition and Culture 9 (1-2): 1-14. 2009.Authentic objects are those that have a historical link to a person, event, time, or place of some significance. The current study examines everyday beliefs about authentic objects, with three primary goals: to determine the scope of adults' evaluation of authentic objects, to examine such evaluation in two distinct cultural settings, and to determine whether a person's attachment history predicts evaluation of authentic objects. We found that college students in the UK and the USA consistently …Read more
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24You Get What You Need: An Examination of Purpose‐Based Inheritance Reasoning in Undergraduates, Preschoolers, and Biological ExpertsCognitive Science 38 (2): 197-243. 2014.This set of seven experiments examines reasoning about the inheritance and acquisition of physical properties in preschoolers, undergraduates, and biology experts. Participants (N = 390) received adoption vignettes in which a baby animal was born to one parent but raised by a biologically unrelated parent, and they judged whether the offspring would have the same property as the birth or rearing parent. For each vignette, the animal parents had contrasting values on a physical property dimension…Read more
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23A cross-linguistic comparison of generic noun phrases in English and MandarinCognition 66 (3): 215-248. 1998.
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22The role of preschoolers’ social understanding in evaluating the informativeness of causal interventionsCognition 107 (3): 1084-1092. 2008.
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21The Importance of Clarifying Evolutionary Terminology Across Disciplines and in the Classroom: A Reply to KampourakisCognitive Science 39 (4): 838-841. 2015.
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21Bewitchment, Biology, or Both: The Co-Existence of Natural and Supernatural Explanatory Frameworks Across DevelopmentCognitive Science 32 (4): 607-642. 2008.Three studies examined the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5-, 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho-speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were both available. Results indicated that, although biological explanations for illness were endorsed at high levels, witchcraft was also often endorsed. …Read more
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19Sample diversity and premise typicality in inductive reasoning: Evidence for developmental changeCognition 108 (2): 543-556. 2008.
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19Children’s and Adults’ Intuitions about Who Can Own ThingsJournal of Cognition and Culture 12 (3-4): 265-286. 2012.
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19A Slippery Myth: How Learning Style Beliefs Shape Reasoning about Multimodal Instruction and Related Scientific EvidenceCognitive Science 45 (10). 2021.The learning style myth is a commonly held myth that matching instruction to a student's “learning style” will result in improved learning, while providing mismatched instruction will result in suboptimal learning. The present study used a short online reasoning exercise about the efficacy of multimodal instruction to investigate the nature of learning styles beliefs. We aimed to: understand how learning style beliefs interact with beliefs about multimodal learning; characterize the potential co…Read more
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18Different kinds of concepts and different kinds of words: What words do for human cognitionIn Denis Mareschal, Paul Quinn & Stephen E. G. Lea (eds.), The Making of Human Concepts, Oxford University Press. pp. 101--130. 2010.
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17What makes Voldemort tick? Children's and adults' reasoning about the nature of villainsCognition 233 (C): 105357. 2023.
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17Preschoolers’ use of spatiotemporal history, appearance, and proper name in determining individual identityCognition 107 (1): 366-380. 2008.
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10Testing the effects of congruence in adult multilingual acquisition with implications for creole genesisCognition 235 (C): 105387. 2023.
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7To Give or to Receive? The Role of Giver Versus Receiver on Object Tracking and Object Preferences in Children and AdultsJournal of Cognition and Culture 21 (5): 369-388. 2021.For adults, ownership is a concept that rests on principles and connections that apply broadly – whether the owner is the self or someone else, and whether the self is giver or receiver. The present studies tested whether preschool children likewise treat ownership in this abstract fashion. In Experiment 1, 20 children and 24 adults were assigned to be either “givers” or “receivers.” They were then asked to identify which items they and the researcher owned. In Experiment 2, 20 children and 24 a…Read more
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6What's so essential about essentialism? A different perspective on the interaction of perception, language, and conceptual knowledgeCognitive Development 8 (2). 1993.Peer Reviewed.
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5The inherence heuristic: a basis for psychological essentialism?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 490-490. 2014.Cimpian & Salomon provide evidence that psychological essentialism rests on a domain-general attention to inherent causes. We suggest that the inherence heuristic may itself be undergirded by a more foundational cognitive bias, namely, a realist assumption about environmental regularities. In contrast, when considering specific representations, people may be more likely to activate attention to non-inherent, contingent, and historical links.
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4A Cross-Cultural Developmental Analysis of Children's and Adults' Understanding of Illness in South Asia and the United StatesJournal of Cognition and Culture 4 (2): 293-317. 2004.Forty-one Indian and American preschoolers, 48 first graders, 41 third graders, 43 fifth graders, and 48 college students were presented with vignettes that described symptoms of illnesses. Participants in both countries were presented with a biological, moral, psychological, and irrelevant choice for each of the illnesses. Results indicated that across all ages in both countries, the biological model was the most prominent. However, with increasing age Indian participants acknowledged significa…Read more
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3Conceptual and lexical hierarchies in young childrenCognitive Development 4 (4). 1989.Linguistic form and conceptual level both play a role in the structure of adult lexical hierarchies. The present studies examined how these factors might affect acquisition. In their linguistic form, labels can be single nouns or compound nouns. In conceptual level, categories can be structured at the basic, superordinate, or subordinate levels. Both of these factors were varied in two experiments, in which 133 children, aged 2;11 to 5;11, were taught novel lexical hierarchies. As predicted, com…Read more
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2Does this Smile Make me Look White? Exploring the Effects of Emotional Expressions on the Categorization of Multiracial ChildrenJournal of Cognition and Culture 17 (3-4): 218-231. 2017.Previous research shows that Multiracial adults are categorized as more Black than White, especially when they have angry facial expressions. The present research examined the extent to which these categorization patterns extended to Multiracial children, with both White and Black participants. Consistent with past research, both White and Black participants categorized Multiracial children as more Black than White. Counter to what was found with Multiracial adults in previous research, emotiona…Read more
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Preschool Children's Use of Trait Labels to Make Inductive InferencesJournal of Experimental Child Psychology 77 1-19. 2000.
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University of Michigan, Ann ArborRegular Faculty
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America