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.causal reasoning | social cognition | cognitive development | adolescence | life history O ne of the most distinctive biological features of human beings is our unusual life history. Compared with our closest primate relatives, we have a dramatically extended childhood, including an exceptionally long middle childhood and adolescence. Moreover, humans have shorter interbirth intervals than our closest primate relatives, producing an even greater number of less-capable children (1). There is evidence for other human adaptations that helped cope with this flood of needy young. In contrast to our closest primate relatives, human children enjoy the benefits of care from three sources in addition to biological mothers: pair-bonded fathers (2), alloparents (3), and postmenopausal women, in particular, grandmothers (4).It may seem evolutionarily paradoxical that humans would have developed a life history that includes such expensive and vulnerable young for such a long period. However, across many different species, including birds and both placental and marsupial mammals, there is a very general (although not perfect) correlation between relative brain size, intelligence and a reliance on learning, and an extended period of immaturity (5-7). This correlation suggests a relation between our distinctive human life history and our equally distinctive large brains and reliance on learning, particularly cultural learning. Such a relation between biology and culture ...

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This study explores the development of free will beliefs across cultures. Sixty-seven Chinese 4- and 6-year-olds were asked questions to gauge whether they believed that people could freely choose to inhibit or act against their desires. Responses were compared to those given by the U.S. children in Kushnir, Gopnik, Chernyak, Seiver, and Wellman (). Results indicate that children from both cultures increased the amount of choice they ascribed with age. For inhibition questions, Chinese children ascribed less choice than the U.S. children. Qualitative explanations revealed that the U.S. children were also more likely to endorse notions of autonomous choice. These findings suggest both cultural differences and similarities in free will beliefs.

Previously, research on wishful thinking has found that desires bias older children's and adults' predictions during probabilistic reasoning tasks. In the present paper, we explore wishful thinking in children aged 3-to 10years-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 5 experiments, we compare low-and middle-income U.S. 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.

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 U.S. 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. CAUSAL LEARNING ACROSS CULTURE AND SES 3 Causal learning across culture and socioeconomic statusComing to understand the causal structure of the world is a central part of cognitive and conceptual development. Causal learning plays an especially important role in the development of intuitive theories of the world, such as folk biology and "theory of mind". In the past fifteen years, there has been a large body of research showing how computational systems can accurately infer causal relations from statistical patterns of data (e.g. Spirtes, Glymour, & Scheines,1993;Pearl, 2009;Tenenbaum, Kemp, Griffiths, & Goodman, 2011). There have also been hundreds of causal learning experiments with toddlers and preschoolers, coming from a number of different laboratories (see Gopnik &Wellman 2012; Xu & Kushnir, 2012 for recent reviews). These studies show remarkably high levels of competence in young children. In fact, some recent causal learning studies have yielded a counterintuitive pattern of findings: the ability to infer certain types of abstract causal relations from evidence actually appears to decline with age, so that younger children do better than older children and adults (Gopnik, Griffiths, & Lucas, 2015;Lucas, Bridgers, Griffiths, & Gopnik, 2014; Seiver, Gopnik & Goodman, 2013, Gopnik et al. in press).However, to our knowledge, these studies have all examined children in similar middleto upper-class samples in North America and Europe-i.e., children from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic) cultures (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). There has been important cross-cultural work on the development of intuitive theories (e.g. Avis & Harris, 1991;Callaghan et al, 2005;Coley 2012;Gelman & Legare, 2011;Medin & Atran, 2004;Wellman et al. 2006), but not on the causal learning abilities that might help underpin this development. CAUSAL LEARNING ACROSS CULTURE AND SES 4In the current paper, we extend research on causal learning to two very different types of populations: a cross-cultural sample of relatively low-income Peruvian children and adults and a cross-socioeconomic sample of children from low-income North American families. There is increasing recognition of the importance of including a wider range of particip...