Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (9 results)

  • Thesis
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2018)

Previously developmental psychologists have explored how young children reason about

desires, and how desires constrain children’s inferences. For example, early research on theory of

mind explored when young children come to understand that people have different desires, and

how young children reason about conflicting desires across individuals or over the course of time

(e.g. Wellman and Liu, 2004). Relatedly, studies have explored how desires influence children’s

inferences about actions, finding that young children generally believe that people act

consistently with their desires (e.g. Kushnir, Gopnik, Chernyak, Seiver, and Wellman, 2015).

Studies on wishful thinking and optimism, on the other hand, have found that desires may more

broadly constrain inferences across a variety of domains. In particular, studies have shown that

desires bias older children’s and adults’ predictions about stochastic events (e.g. Krizan and

Windschitl, 2009). In Chapter 1 I outline previous research exploring how young children reason

about desires.

In Chapters 2 through 4 I present a series of cross-cultural developmental studies

exploring how desires impact children’s inferences. In Chapter 2, I explore the development of

beliefs about agency in Chinese and U.S. 4- and 6-year-old children, and if children believe that

people can ‘choose to’ act inconsistently with a desire, or practice self-control. Findings suggest

both differences and similarities across groups of children.

In Chapter 3, I present a similar study contrasting Peruvian and U.S. 4- to 7-year-olds. I

also explore if developmental changes in beliefs about self-control are related to first person

experiences practicing self-control. When contrasting Peruvian and U.S. children, findings

suggest differences in beliefs about self-control, however children demonstrated comparable

self-control skills. In addition, cultural group mediated the relationship between children’s 1st

person experiences practicing self-control, and their corresponding beliefs about self-control.

In Chapter 4, I present a series of studies exploring the influence of desires on young

Peruvian and U.S. children’s (3-to 7-year-olds) predictions about stochastic events. Findings

suggest that desires strongly constrain young children’s inferences across cultures.

Finally, in Chapter 5 I discuss the implications of these findings, as well as present

several avenues for future research. These findings more broadly contribute to our scientific

understanding of how young children reason about desirable possibilities, and how culture

impacts conceptual development.

    Cover page: The influence of desires on young children’s reasoning
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2020)
    Previously, research on wishful thinking has found that desires bias older children's and adults' predictions during probabilistic reasoning tasks. In this article, we explore wishful thinking in children aged 3- to 10-years-old. Do young children learn to be wishful thinkers? Or do they begin with a wishful thinking bias that is gradually overturned during development? Across five experiments, we compare low- and middle-income United States and Peruvian 3- to 10-year-old children (N = 682). Children were asked to make predictions during games of chance. Across experiments, preschool-aged children from all backgrounds consistently displayed a strong wishful thinking bias. However, the bias declined with age.
      Cover page: Young Children Are Wishful Thinkers: The Development of Wishful Thinking in 3‐ to 10‐Year‐Old Children
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 36 (2014)
        Cover page: Cultural variability in young children’s folk intuitions of free will
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC San Francisco Previously Published Works (2014)
        Participation in clinical research trials has been hypothesized to facilitate the adoption of evidence-based practices by community-based substance abuse treatment providers. However, little empirical information is available regarding the methodological and collaborative characteristics of research trials that may affect the chances of adoption. The current paper describes the development of the Survey of Practiced Research Efforts to Aid Dissemination (SPREAD), a standardized instrument designed to measure characteristics of clinical trials that may facilitate adoption. The survey was administered to a sample of 33 community-based research trials from the top four impact factor journals of 2007. Overall, methodological quality was high and levels of collaboration were low, with little involvement of community-based clinic staff in most study related activities. Future research to determine the predictive validity of the SPREAD instrument on post-trial adoption of studies interventions in clinical research is encouraged. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York.
          Cover page: Development of an Instrument to Characterize Methodological and Collaborative Factors that May Influence Community-Based Clinician Post-Trial Adoption of Clinical Research Interventions
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 39 (2017)
          Research on wishful thinking suggests that desires bias adult’s probability judgments. Previous research has yet toexplore if this extends to young children. In Experiment 1, 260 4- and 6-year-olds in the U.S. and Peru played a card game,where selecting a desirable card was unlikely. In Experiment 2, 200 4- to 6-year-old children were shown a bag of plasticeggs; a few contained desirable prizes. Children were asked to make predictions about what card / egg would be randomlyselected. Answers were compared to control conditions in which probability was comparable, but children had no reason todesire a specific outcome. In control conditions, children tended to state that the majority card/ egg would be selected. In theexperimental conditions, children were more likely to state that the desirable (and improbable) card/ egg would be selected.Results suggest that a desire bias extends to children as young as 4.
            Cover page: Desires influence 4- to 6-year-old children’s probabilistic judgments
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 37 (2015)
            This is a cross-cultural replication of Seiver, Gopnik & Goodman (2013) and compares the development of social causal attributions in Chinese and U.S. children. In this study, Chinese (n=110) 4-and 6-year-olds were directly compared to the U.S. children in Seiver, Gopnik & Goodman (2013). Children were shown covariation evidence that varied across conditions to imply that a person, situation, or neither was the cause of a person’s actions. Following observation, children were asked to explain why the person engaged in the actions. Findings indicate that U.S. children significantly increased the amount of person attributions they made with age, while Chinese 4-and 6-year-olds answered comparably. Children from both cultures were sensitive to covariation manipulations when they suggested a person was the cause of an action. Only U.S. children were sensitive to evidence when it favored the situation.
              Cover page: Culture, causal attributions, and development: A comparison of Chinese and U.S. 4-and 6-year-olds
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 38 (2016)
              This study explores the relationship between beliefs aboutself-control and the ability to exercise self-control in 4- to 6-year-old children. Sixty-eight children were asked a series ofquestions to gauge whether they believed that they couldfreely choose to act against their desires or inhibit themselvesfrom performing desired actions. Children were also asked toprovide qualitative explanations for why they could or couldnot exercise free will, and to complete two inhibitory controltasks: forbidden toy and day/night. Choice responses werenegatively correlated with performance on the forbidden toytask, when children performed that task first. There was also anegative correlation between a belief in an internal locus ofcontrol, and success on the forbidden toy measure. Refrainingfrom touching a forbidden toy appears to be correlated to lessbelief in free will. Though this may appear counter-intuitive,it is consistent with cross-cultural research.
                Cover page: The Relationship Between Inhibitory Control and Free Will Beliefs in 4-to 6-Year-Old-Children
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC San Diego Previously Published Works (2019)
                Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds in Head Start programs, and middle-class children from the United States participated in a causal learning task (N = 435). Consistent with previous studies, children learned both specific causal relations and more abstract causal principles across culture and socioeconomic status (SES). The Peruvian children and adults generally performed like middle-class U.S. children and adults, but the low-SES U.S. children showed some differences.
                  Cover page: Causal Learning Across Culture and Socioeconomic Status
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2017)
                  How was the evolution of our unique biological life history related to distinctive human developments in cognition and culture? We suggest that the extended human childhood and adolescence allows a balance between exploration and exploitation, between wider and narrower hypothesis search, and between innovation and imitation in cultural learning. In particular, different developmental periods may be associated with different learning strategies. This relation between biology and culture was probably coevolutionary and bidirectional: life-history changes allowed changes in learning, which in turn both allowed and rewarded extended life histories. In two studies, we test how easily people learn an unusual physical or social causal relation from a pattern of evidence. We track the development of this ability from early childhood through adolescence and adulthood. In the physical domain, preschoolers, counterintuitively, perform better than school-aged children, who in turn perform better than adolescents and adults. As they grow older learners are less flexible: they are less likely to adopt an initially unfamiliar hypothesis that is consistent with new evidence. Instead, learners prefer a familiar hypothesis that is less consistent with the evidence. In the social domain, both preschoolers and adolescents are actually the most flexible learners, adopting an unusual hypothesis more easily than either 6-y-olds or adults. There may be important developmental transitions in flexibility at the entry into middle childhood and in adolescence, which differ across domains.
                    Cover page: Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood
                    Top