Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children's Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts

Banerjee, Konika; Haque, Omar Sultan; Spelke, Elizabeth S.

doi:10.1111/cogs.12037

Cited by 80 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Previous research finds that children better remembered details for stories that contained up to two violations (e.g., a banana that felt angry and could turn invisible), compared to stories with no violations (e.g., a banana that was yellow and smelled good) or too many violations (e.g., a banana that felt angry, could turn invisible, and could live in outer space without oxygen) (Banerjee, Haque, & Spelke, 2013). The events we showed children contained a single violation of a core principle of object behavior.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Stahl

Feigenson

2017

Cognition

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Children, including infants, have expectations about the world around them, and produce reliable responses when these expectations are violated. However, little is known about how such expectancy violations affect subsequent cognition. Here we tested the hypothesis that violations of expectation enhance children’s learning. In four experiments we compared 3- to 6-year-old children’s ability to learn novel words in situations that defied versus accorded with their core knowledge of object behavior. In Experiments 1 and 2 we taught children novel words following one of two types of events. One event violated expectations about the spatiotemporal or featural properties of objects (e.g., an object appeared to magically change locations). The other event was almost identical, but did not violate expectations (e.g., an object was visibly moved from one location to another). In both experiments we found that children robustly learned when taught after the surprising event, but not following the expected event. In Experiment 3 we ruled out two alternative explanations for our results. Finally, in Experiment 4, we asked whether surprise affects children’s learning in a targeted or a diffuse way. We found that surprise only enhanced children’s learning about the entity that had behaved surprisingly, and not about unrelated objects. Together, these experiments show that core knowledge – and violations of expectations generated by core knowledge – shapes new learning.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Stahl

Feigenson

2017

Cognition

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“…Research with children and adults demonstrates that whether ideas are memorable depends on just how counterintuitive they are (e.g., Banerjee, Haque, & Spelke, 2013; Barrett & Nyhof, 2001; Boyer & Ramble, 2001; Norenzayan, Atran, Faulkner, & Schaller, 2006). Ideas that are completely ordinary are not as attention-grabbing, and thus not as memorable, as ideas that contain counterintuitive elements.…”

Section: Believing Counterintuitive Claimsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confronting, Representing, and Believing Counterintuitive Concepts: Navigating the Natural and the Supernatural

Lane

Harris

2014

Perspect Psychol Sci

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Recent research shows that even preschoolers are skeptical; they frequently reject claims from other people when the claims conflict with their own perceptions and concepts. Yet, despite their skepticism, both children and adults come to believe in a variety of phenomena that defy their first-hand perceptions and intuitive conceptions of the world. In this review, we explore how children and adults acquire such concepts. We describe how a similar developmental process underlies mental representation of both the natural and the supernatural world, and we detail this process for two prominent supernatural counterintuitive ideas—God and the afterlife. In doing so, we highlight the fact that conceptual development does not always move in the direction of greater empirical truth, as described within naturalistic domains. We consider factors that likely help overcome skepticism, and in doing so promote belief in counterintuitive phenomena. These factors include qualities of the learners, aspects of the context, qualities of the informants, and qualities of the information.

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“…An ontology is a basic category of existence, such as Bobject^or Banimal,^and an ontological violation is a violation of one of the category's core properties, such as solidity (in the case of objects) or mortality (in the case of animals). Ontological violations have been shown to affect an event's memorability in that events that violate one or two ontological commitments (e.g., a tree that never dies) are more memorable than events that violate no ontological commitments (e.g., a tree that bears fruit) or events that violate several ontological commitments (e.g., a tree that never dies, can speak, and floats in the air) (Atran & Norenzayan, 2004;Banerjee, Haque, and Spelke, 2013;Barrett & Nyhof, 2001;Boyer & Ramble, 2001). The memorability of an ontological violation affects, in turn, how often and how reliably these ideas are passed from one person to another and from one generation to another.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The explanatory structure of unexplainable events: Causal constraints on magical reasoning

Shtulman

Morgan

2017

Psychon Bull Rev

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A common intuition, often captured in fiction, is that some impossible events (e.g., levitating a stone) are Bmore impossible^than others (e.g., levitating a feather). We investigated the source of this intuition, hypothesizing that graded notions of impossibility arise from explanatory considerations logically precluded by the violation at hand but still taken into account. Studies 1-4 involved college undergraduates (n = 357), and Study 5 involved preschool-aged children (n = 32). In Studies 1 and 2, participants saw pairs of magical spells that violated one of 18 causal principles-six physical, six biological, and six psychological-and were asked to indicate which spell would be more difficult to learn. Both spells violated the same causal principle but differed in their relation to a subsidiary principle. Participants' judgments of spell difficulty honored the subsidiary principle, even when participants were given the option of judging the two spells equally difficult. Study 3 replicated those effects with Likert-type ratings; Study 4 replicated them in an open-ended version of the task in which participants generated their own causal violations; and Study 5 replicated them with children. Taken together, these findings suggest that events that defy causal explanation are interpreted in terms of explanatory considerations that hold in the absence of such violations.

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Melting Lizards and Crying Mailboxes: Children's Preferential Recall of Minimally Counterintuitive Concepts

Cited by 80 publications

References 35 publications

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Expectancy violations promote learning in young children

Confronting, Representing, and Believing Counterintuitive Concepts: Navigating the Natural and the Supernatural

The explanatory structure of unexplainable events: Causal constraints on magical reasoning

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