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Identifying high-quality causal explanations is key to scientific understanding. This research (N = 202; 50% girls; Mage: 5.82 years; 64% Asian, 33% White, and 3% multiracial; data collected from 2018 to 2024) examined how explanation circularity and informants' social dominance impact children's learning preferences for causal explanations. Raised in a culture valuing circular logic, Chinese children still preferred non-circular explanations and learning from informants providing non-circular explanations (d ≥ 0.50). When informants with non-circular explanations were subordinate to those with circular explanations, Chinese and American children preferred non-circular over circular explanations (d = 1.10), but did not prefer learning new information from either informant. Although children weigh explanation quality over informant dominance when seeking explanations for given questions, they consider both cues when evaluating informants' credibility.

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This study explores how caregiver-child scientific conversation during storybook reading focusing on the challenges or achievements of famous female scientists impacts preschoolers' mindset, beliefs about success, and persistence. Caregiver-child dyads (N = 202, 100 female, 35% non-White, aged 4-5, ƒ = .15) were assigned to one of three storybook conditions, highlighting the female scientist's achievements, effort, or, in a baseline condition, neither. Children were asked about their mindset, presented with a persistence task, and asked about their understanding of effort and success. Findings demonstrate that storybooks highlighting effort are associated with growth mindset, attribution of success to hard work, and increased persistence. Caregiver language echoed language from the assigned storybook, showing the importance of reading storybooks emphasizing hard work.

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Children and adults express greater confidence in the existence of invisible scientific as compared to invisible religious entities. To further examine this differential confidence, 5- to 11-year-old Turkish children and their parents (N = 174, 122 females) from various regions in Türkiye, a country with an ongoing tension between secularism and religion, were tested in 2021 for their belief in invisible entities. Participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific than religious entities. For scientific entities, children justified their belief primarily by elaborating on the properties of the entity, rather than referring to the testimonial source of their judgment. This pattern was reversed for religious entities, arguably, highlighting the role of polarization in shaping the testimony children typically hear.

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Understanding cognitive effort expended during assessments is essential to improving efficiency, accuracy, and accessibility within these assessments. Pupil dilation is commonly used as a psychophysiological measure of cognitive effort, yet research on its relationship with effort expended specifically during language processing is limited. The present study adds to and expands on this literature by investigating the relationships among pupil dilation, trial difficulty, and accuracy during a vocabulary test. Participants (n = 63, Mage = 19.25) completed a subset of trials from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test while seated at an eye-tracker monitor. During each trial, four colored images were presented on the monitor while a word was presented via audio recording. Participants verbally indicated which image they thought represented the target word. Words were categorized into Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty. Pupil dilation during the Medium and Hard trials was significantly greater than during the Easy trials, though the Medium and Hard trials did not significantly differ from each other. Pupil dilation in comparison to trial accuracy presented a more complex pattern, with comparisons between accurate and inaccurate trials differing depending on the timing of the stimulus presentation. These results present further evidence that pupil dilation increases with cognitive effort associated with vocabulary tests, providing insights that could help refine vocabulary assessments and other related tests of language processing.

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The Developing Belief Network is a consortium of researchers studying human development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the interplay between general cognitive development and culturally specific processes of socialization and cultural transmission in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's first wave of data collection, which aims to explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior. This work is guided by three key research questions: (1) How do children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents? (2) How do children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity? (3) How are religious and supernatural beliefs transmitted within and between generations? The protocol is designed to address these questions via a set of nine tasks for children between the ages of 4 and 10 years, a comprehensive survey completed by their parents/caregivers, and a task designed to elicit conversations between children and caregivers. This study is being conducted in 39 distinct cultural-religious groups (to date), spanning 17 countries and 13 languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities, and present the final, English-language study materials for 6 of the 39 cultural-religious groups who are currently being recruited for this study: Protestant Americans, Catholic Americans, American members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.

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Against the proposal that children have a natural disposition for supernatural or religious beliefs, we review the decades-old evidence showing that children typically invoke naturalistic causes-even in the face of unusual outcomes. Instead, we propose that children's tendency to endorse supernatural agents reflects their capacity for cultural learning rather than an inherent inclination to believe in divine powers. We support this argument by reviewing the findings that religious exposure in childhood, not individual cognitive or personality factors, is the major determinant of religiosity in adulthood. We highlight the role of cultural learning in children's endorsement of invisible divine agents by drawing on cross-cultural evidence that children are equally receptive to claims regarding the existence of invisible natural agents. We end by introducing a hypothesis to explain how children come to endorse religious beliefs despite their bias toward naturalistic explanation.

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Across cultures, studies report more confidence in the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena, such as germs, as compared to unobservable religious phenomena, such as angels. We investigated a potential cultural mechanism for the transmission of confidence in the existence of invisible entities. Specifically, we asked whether parents in societies with markedly different religious profiles-Iran and China-signal differential confidence across the domains of science and religion during unmoderated conversations with their children (N = 120 parent-child dyads in total; 5- to 11-year-olds). The results revealed that parents used fewer lexical cues to uncertainty when discussing scientific phenomena, as compared to religious phenomena. Unsurprisingly, this cross-domain distinction was observed among majority belief, secular parents in China (Study 2). More importantly, however, the same pattern was observed among parents in Iran, a highly religious society (Study 1), as well as among minority belief, religious parents in China (Study 2). Thus, adults in markedly different belief communities spontaneously express less confidence in religious, as compared to scientific, invisible entities in naturalistic conversation. These findings contribute to theories on the role of culture and testimony in the development of beliefs about unobservable phenomena.

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Clark and Fischer propose that people interpret social robots not as social agents, but as interactive depictions. Drawing on research focusing on how children selectively learn from social others, we argue that children do not view social robots as interactive toys but instead treat them as social learning partners and critical sources of information.

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Parents' questions are an effective strategy for fostering the development of young children's science understanding and discourse. However, this work has not yet distinguished whether the frequency of questions about scientific content differs between mothers and fathers, despite some evidence from other contexts (i.e., book reading) showing that fathers ask more questions than mothers. The current study compared fathers' and mothers' questions to their four- to six-year-old children (N = 49) while interacting with scientific stimuli at a museum research exhibit. Results indicated that fathers asked significantly more questions than mothers, and fathers' questions were more strongly related to children's scientific discourse. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of adult questions for the development of children's scientific understanding as well as broadening research to include interlocutors other than mothers.

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Women are underrepresented in STEM fields across the world. We investigate a perceptual mechanism that may contribute to this gender disparity beginning in early childhood. We explore how visual information about the gender composition of a group of scientists impacts children's persistence on a STEM task and their evaluations of group members. One hundred sixty-six 4- to 6-year-old children viewed one of four groups of scientists: all-male, all-female, a lone female among all-males, or a lone male among all-females. Whereas children's persistence on a STEM task did not change across conditions, their trait judgments did. Children judged the all-male and all-female group scientists as "hardworking," but judged the lone female scientist as "smart." However, they were as likely to judge the lone male scientist as "smart" as to judge him "hardworking." The role of group visualization as a learning mechanism impacting children's perceptions of scientists as early as the preschool years is discussed.

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Children's naïve theories about causal regularities enable them to differentiate factual narratives describing real events and characters from fictional narratives describing made-up events and characters (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, Cognition 113 (2): 213-225, 2009). But what happens when children are consistently presented with accounts of miraculous and causally impossible events as real occurrences? Previous research has shown that preschoolers with consistent exposure to religious teaching tend to systematically judge characters involved in fantastical or religious events as real (Corriveau et al., Cognitive Science, 39 (2), 353-382, 2015; Davoodi et al., Developmental Psychology, 52 (2), 221, 2016). In the current study, we extended this line of work by asking about the scope of the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments. Specifically, we asked whether this effect is  domain-general or domain-specific. We tested children in Iran, where regular exposure to uniform religious beliefs might influence children's reasoning about possibility in non-religious domains, in addition to the domain of religion. Children with no or minimal schooling (5- to 6-year-olds) and older elementary school students (9- to 10-year-olds) judged the reality status of different kinds of stories, notably realistic, unusual (but nonetheless realistic), religious, and magical stories. We found that while younger children were not systematic in their judgments, older children often judged religious stories as real but rarely judged magical stories as real. This developmental pattern suggests that the impact of religious exposure on children's reality judgments does not extend beyond their reasoning about divine intervention. Children's justifications for their reality judgments provided further support for this domain-specific influence of religious teaching.

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Jagiello and colleagues offer a bifocal stance theory of cultural evolution for understanding how individuals flexibly choose between instrumental and ritual stances in social learning. We argue that the role of culture, developmental age-related differences, and the intersectionality of these and other individual's identities need to be more fully considered in this theoretical framework.

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We describe the theoretical and methodological contributions of a cultural and developmental approach to the study of religious belief and behavior. We focus on how the study of religious development can provide a foothold into answering some key questions in developmental science: What is belief? What is culture? What is the nature of human development? Throughout the chapter, we provide examples of methodological innovations that have emerged over the course of the first year of a global, collaborative research project into the development of religious beliefs and behaviors.

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Recent research has shown that a religious upbringing renders children receptive to ordinarily impossible outcomes, but the underlying mechanism for this effect remains unclear. Exposure to religious teachings might alter children's basic understanding of causality. Alternatively, religious exposure might only affect children's religious cognition, not their causal judgments more generally. To test between these possibilities, 6- to 11-year-old children attending either secular (n = 49, 51% female, primarily White and middle-class) or parochial schools (n = 42, 48% female, primarily White and middle-class) heard stories in which characters experienced negative outcomes and indicated how those characters could have prevented them. Both groups of children spontaneously invoked interventions consistent with natural causal laws. Similarly, when judging the plausibility of several counterfactual interventions, participants endorsed the intervention consistent with natural laws at high levels, irrespective of schooling. However, children's endorsement of supernatural interventions inconsistent with these laws revealed both group similarities and differences. Although both groups of children judged divine intervention (i.e., via prayer) as more plausible than mental (i.e., via wishing) and magical (i.e., via magical powers) interventions, children receiving religious (vs. secular) schooling were more likely to do so. Moreover, although children with a secular upbringing overwhelmingly chose naturalistic interventions as the most effective, children with a religious upbringing chose divine as well as naturalistic intervention. These results indicate that religious teaching does not alter children's basic understanding of causality but rather adds divine intervention to their repertoire of possible causal factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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This study explored how conventional versus instrumental language influenced children's imitation and transmission of non-affordant tool use. Rather than examining children's imitation of unnecessary actions that do not impede goal completion, we examined children's conformity with a modeled behavior that may result in sacrificing goal completion. Children (N = 96 4- to 6-year-olds) were presented with either a conventional or instrumental description of a model's actions before watching the model choose a non-affordant tool. Children who heard conventional language imitated and transmitted the model's non-affordant tool choice at significantly higher rates than when they heard instrumental language. The results have implications for children, parents, and teachers regarding the extent to which children will conform with what "we" are "supposed" to do.

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Five- to 11-year-old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity, whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse.

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Across two studies (N = 120), we investigated the development of children's ability to calibrate the certainty of verbal testimony with observable data that varied in the degree of predictive causal accuracy. In Study 1, 4- and 5-year-olds heard a certain explanation or an uncertain explanation about deterministic causal relations. The 5-year-olds made more accurate causal inferences when the informant provided a certain and more calibrated explanation. In Study 2, children heard similar explanations about probabilistic relations, making the uncertain informant more calibrated. The 5-year-olds were more likely to infer the correct causal relations when the informant was uncertain, but only when the explanation was attuned to the stochasticity of the individual causal events (or outcomes that sometimes occur). These findings imply that the capacity to integrate, and make efficient inferences, from distinct sources of knowledge emerges during the preschool years.

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Within the domains of both science and religion, beliefs in unobservable phenomena - such as bacteria or the soul - are common. Yet given the radically different trajectory of scientific as compared to religious beliefs across human history, it is plausible that the psychological basis for beliefs in these two domains is also different. Indeed, there is evidence from children and adults in various cultures that people have greater confidence in their scientific beliefs than in their religious beliefs. However, when individuals are invited to indicate the basis for their beliefs within each domain, a surprisingly similar pattern of justification is apparent.

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We asked whether high levels of religiosity are inconsistent with a high valuation of science. We explored this possibility in three countries that diverge markedly in the relation between the state and religion. Parents in the United States (n = 126), China (n = 234) and Iran (n = 77) completed a survey about their personal and parental stance towards science. The relation between religiosity and the valuation of science varied sharply by country. In the U.S. sample, greater religiosity was associated with a lower valuation of science. A similar but weaker negative relation was found in the Chinese sample. Parents in the Iranian sample, by contrast, valued science highly, despite high levels of religiosity. Given the small size of our United States and Iranian samples, and the non-probabilistic nature of our samples in general, we caution readers not to generalise our findings beyond the current samples. Despite this caveat, these findings qualify the assumption that religiosity is inconsistent with the valuation of science and highlight the role of sociocultural context in shaping adults' perception of the relation between religion and science.

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Osiurak and Reynaud offer a unified cognitive approach to cumulative technological culture, arguing that it begins with non-social cognitive skills that allow humans to learn and develop new technical information. Drawing on research focusing on how children acquire knowledge through interactions others, we argue that social learning is essential for humans to acquire technical information.

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