title: Melting lizards and crying mailboxes: children's preferential recall of minimally counterintuitive concepts.
abstract: Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven- to nine-year-old children who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1 week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early-emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone.
authors: Department of Psychology, Harvard University.
authors: Konika
authors: K
authors: Banerjee
authors: Omar S
authors: OS
authors: Haque
authors: Elizabeth S
authors: ES
authors: Spelke
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D012067:Religion
keywords: Concepts; Counterintuitive; Culture; Evolution; Memory; Religion
references: Trends Cogn Sci. 2010 Mar;14(3):104-9
references: 20149715
references: Behav Brain Sci. 2006 Dec;29(6):595-613; discussion 613-50
references: 17918647
references: Behav Brain Sci. 2004 Dec;27(6):713-30; discussion 730-70
references: 16035401
references: Trends Cogn Sci. 2004 Jan;8(1):40-6
references: 14697402
references: Memory. 1994 Jun;2(2):129-48
references: 7584288
references: Trends Cogn Sci. 2003 Mar;7(3):119-124
references: 12639693
references: Trends Cogn Sci. 2000 Jan;4(1):29-34
references: 10637620
references: Cogn Sci. 2007 May 6;31(3):415-39
references: 21635303
references: Dev Sci. 2007 Jan;10(1):89-96
references: 17181705
references: Cogn Sci. 2006 May 6;30(3):531-53
references: 21702824
references: Annu Rev Psychol. 1992;43:337-75
references: 1539946
references: Dev Sci. 2007 Jan;10(1):147-51
references: 17181713