Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explored children’s developing understanding of mentallife using a novel approach to track changes in conceptualstructure from the bottom up by analyzing patterns of men-tal capacity attributions. US children (n=247) evaluated ele-phants, goats, mice, birds, beetles, teddy bears, dolls, robots,and computers on a range of mental capacities, allowing us toassess which attributions “go together” and how these concep-tual connections might develop over early and middle child-hood. Replicating previous studies with adults and older chil-dren, an exploratory factor analysis of older children’s (7-9y)responses revealed a three-way distinction between physiolog-ical abilities (e.g., hunger, smell), social-emotional abilities(e.g., guilt, embarrassment), and perceptual-cognitive abili-ties (e.g., choice, memory), corresponding to traditional no-tions of BODY, HEART, and MIND. Hints of this three-way distinction emerged among younger children (4-6y), butyounger children appeared to perceive markedly stronger con-nections among physiological and social-emotional abilities,while clearly distinguishing both from the MIND.