Constraints on the Acquisition of Social Category Concepts

Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990 Atran , S. (1990). Cognitive foundations of natural history: Towards an anthropology of science . New York , NY : Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]; Gil-White, 2001 Gil-White , F. J. ( 2001 ). Are ethnic groups biological ‘species’ to the human brain? Essentialism in our cognition of some social categories . Current Anthropology , 42 , 515 – 554 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning (Bigler &; Liben, 2007 Bigler , R. S. , &; Liben , L. S. ( 2007 ). Developmental intergroup theory: Explaining and reducing children's social stereotyping and prejudice . Current Directions in Psychological Science , 16 , 162 – 166 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Gelman, 2003 Gelman , S. A. ( 2003 ). The essential child: Origins of essentialism in everyday thought . New York , NY : Oxford University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). A novel groups procedure was employed to examine the independent effects of noun labels and visual cues on social categorization. Experiment 1 demonstrated that in the absence of a visual cue, a noun label supported social categorization among 4-year-olds and 7-year-olds. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that children and adults fail to differentiate between intrinsic and nonintrinsic visual cues to category membership, suggesting that this distinction is not central to the acquisition of social category concepts. Experiments 2 and 3 also showed that in the absence of a shared noun label, visual cues were not sufficient for younger children to form social categories. Experiment 4 ruled out a potential demand characteristic in the previous experiments. Together, these results reveal the primacy of verbal labels over visual cues for social categorization in young children and suggest a developmental change between ages 4 and 7 in the ability to construct new representations of social category concepts.     

Biases in the perceived timing of perisaccadic perceptual and motor events

Subjects typically experience the temporal interval immediately following a saccade as longer than a comparable control interval. One explanation of this effect is that the brain antedates the perceptual onset of a saccade target to around the time of saccade initiation. This could explain the apparent continuity of visual perception across eye movements. This antedating account was tested in three experiments in which subjects made saccades of differing extents and then judged either the duration or the temporal order of key events. Postsaccadic stimuli underwent subjective temporal lengthening and had early perceived onsets. A temporally advanced awareness of saccade completion was also found, independently of antedating effects. These results provide convergent evidence supporting antedating and differentiating it from other temporal biases.     

Beyond Discrete Categories: Studying Multiracial,Intersex, and Transgender Children Will Strengthen Basic Developmental Science

Developmental research on social categorization has overwhelmingly focused on perceptions about and experiences of individuals who are clear or prototypical members of discrete and usually dichotomous social categories. For example, studies of social categorization, stereotyping, prejudice, and social identity have generally explored how children reason about others who are gender-typical boys or girls or monoracial White or Black children. Similarly, research participants have generally been gender-typical and monoracial. However, our efforts to build theories that account for the true range of variation require acknowledging the increasing visibility of children who do not fit into these discrete categories and raise the question of whether existing theories can capture the dynamics that arise for them. Focusing on race and gender/sex, the social categories that have received the most attention in the developmental literature, we review research that has gone beyond simple dichotomies by including multiracial, gender-nonconforming, or intersex children, either as the targets of social perception or as participants themselves. We argue that this emerging work reveals problematic assumptions built into our theories and methods and highlights the value of building a more inclusive science.     

Vibrotactile--auditory interactions are post-perceptual

Vibrotactile stimuli can elicit compelling auditory sensations, even when sound energy levels are minimal and undetectable. It has previously been shown that subjects judge auditory tones embedded in white noise to be louder when they are accompanied by a vibrotactile stimulus of the same frequency. A first experiment replicated this result at four different levels of auditory stimulation (no tone, tone at detection threshold, tone at 5 dB above threshold, and tone at 10 dB above threshold). The presence of a vibrotactile stimulus induced an increase in the perceived loudness of auditory tones at three of the four values in this range. In two further experiments, a 2-interval forced-choice procedure was used to assess the nature of this cross-modal interaction. Subjects were biased when vibrotaction was applied in one interval, but applying vibrotaction in both intervals produced performance comparable to conditions without vibrotactile stimuli. This demonstrates that vibrotaction is sometimes ignored when judging the presence of an auditory tone. Hence the interaction between vibrotaction and audition does not appear to occur at an early perceptual level.     

Judgments of the lucky across development and culture

For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person. Rather, an individual's own intended, deliberate actions should be the basis of his or her evaluation, reward, and punishment. In a series of studies, the authors investigated whether such rules guide the judgments of children. The first 3 studies demonstrated that children view lucky others as more likely than unlucky others to perform intentional good actions. Children similarly assess the siblings of lucky others as more likely to perform intentional good actions than the siblings of unlucky others. The next 3 studies demonstrated that children as young as 3 years believe that lucky people are nicer than unlucky people. The final 2 studies found that Japanese children also demonstrate a robust preference for the lucky and their associates. These findings are discussed in relation to M. J. Lerner's (1980) just-world theory and J. Piaget's (1932/1965) immanent-justice research and in relation to the development of intergroup attitudes.     

Shifts of criteria or neural timing? The assumptions underlying timing perception studies

In timing perception studies, the timing of one event is usually manipulated relative to another, and participants are asked to judge if the two events were synchronous, or to judge which of the two events occurred first. Responses are analyzed to determine a measure of central tendency, which is taken as an estimate of the timing at which the two events are perceptually synchronous. When these estimates do not coincide with physical synchrony, it is often assumed that the sensory signals are asynchronous, as though the transfer of information concerning one input has been accelerated or decelerated relative to the other. Here we show that, while this is a viable interpretation, it is equally plausible that such effects are driven by shifts in the criteria used to differentiate simultaneous from asynchronous inputs. Our analyses expose important ambiguities concerning the interpretation of simultaneity judgement data, which have hitherto been underappreciated.     

Motor plans persist to influence subsequent actions with four or more response alternatives

Motor activity has the potential to persist after action and influence subsequent behaviour. A standard approach to isolating a motoric influence is to map two stimuli onto each response, so that response and stimulus repetition can be dissociated. A response-only response-repetition (RoRR) effect can then be assessed, arising if the same response made to two unrelated stimuli is nonetheless produced more rapidly. This kind of motoric behavioural influence of one response on the next has proved elusive in reaction time tasks involving choices between key presses, at least when stimuli mapped to each response are difficult to categorise together. However, such tasks have traditionally involved only a few response alternatives. We hypothesised that a larger load on the motor system might prevent participants from holding all possible action plans active throughout an experiment, and thus reveal trial-to-trial motor priming in the form of an RoRR effect. In our first experiment, increasing the number of response alternatives to four or eight yielded a reliable RoRR effect. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2, where it also proved persistent across practice and resistant to changes in response configuration. Our results are consistent with evidence of motoric perseveration in other kinds of motor task, such as reaching and grasping, and have implications for the generation of speeded decisions in a range of activities.     

Spatial grouping resolves ambiguity to drive temporal recalibration

Cross-modal temporal recalibration describes a shift in the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) between 2 events following repeated exposure to asynchronous cross-modal inputs--the adaptors. Previous research suggested that audiovisual recalibration is insensitive to the spatial relationship between the adaptors. Here we show that audiovisual recalibration can be driven by cross-modal spatial grouping. Twelve participants adapted to alternating trains of lights and tones. Spatial position was manipulated, with alternating sequences of a light then a tone, or a tone then a light, presented on either side of fixation (e.g., left tone--left light--right tone--right light, etc.). As the events were evenly spaced in time, in the absence of spatial-based grouping it would be unclear if tones were leading or lagging lights. However, any grouping of spatially colocalized cross-modal events would result in an unambiguous sense of temporal order. We found that adapting to these stimuli caused the PSS between subsequent lights and tones to shift toward the temporal relationship implied by spatial-based grouping. These data therefore show that temporal recalibration is facilitated by spatial grouping.     

The development of race‐based perceptual categorization: skin color dominates early category judgments

Prior research on the development of race‐based categorization has concluded that children understand the perceptual basis of race categories from as early as age 4 (e.g. Aboud, 1988). However, such work has rarely separated the influence of skin color from other physiognomic features considered by adults to be diagnostic of race categories. In two studies focusing on Black–White race categorization judgments in children between the ages of 4 and 9, as well as in adults, we find that categorization decisions in early childhood are determined almost entirely by attention to skin color, with attention to other physiognomic features exerting only a small influence on judgments as late as middle childhood. We further find that when skin color cues are largely eliminated from the stimuli, adults readily shift almost entirely to focus on other physiognomic features. However, 6‐ and 8‐year‐old children show only a limited ability to shift attention to facial physiognomy and so perform poorly on the task. These results demonstrate that attention to ‘race’ in younger children is better conceptualized as attention to skin color, inviting a reinterpretation of past work focusing on children's race‐related cognition.     

Religion insulates ingroup evaluations: the development of intergroup attitudes in India

Research on the development of implicit intergroup attitudes has placed heavy emphasis on race, leaving open how social categories that are prominent in other cultures might operate. We investigate two of India's primary means of social distinction, caste and religion, and explore the development of implicit and explicit attitudes towards these groups in minority‐status Muslim children and majority‐status Hindu children, the latter drawn from various positions in the Hindu caste system. Results from two tests of implicit attitudes find that caste attitudes parallel previous findings for race: higher‐caste children as well as lower‐caste children have robust high‐caste preferences. However, results for religion were strikingly different: both lower‐status Muslim children and higher‐status Hindu children show strong implicit ingroup preferences. We suggest that religion may play a protective role in insulating children from the internalization of stigma.