In the United States, there is a common stereotype associating brilliance with men. This gender brilliance stereotype emerges early and may undermine women's engagement in many prestigious careers. However, past research on its acquisition has focused almost exclusively on American children's beliefs of White people's intellectual talents. Therefore, less is known about how this stereotype develops in non-Western cultures and whether children consider other social identities such as race in forming this stereotype. To address these issues, the present research (a) provided the first cross-cultural test examining its development in 5-to 7-year-old Chinese and American children and (b) compared children's gender brilliance stereotype of White people with that of Asian people. Studies 1 (N = 96; Chinese children) and 2 (N = 96; Chinese children) revealed that, similar to American children, Chinese children associated brilliance with White men (vs. White women) around the age of 6. In contrast, Studies 3 (N = 96; Chinese children) and 4 (N = 96; American children; 76.9% White) showed that 5-to 7-year-old children from both cultures associated brilliance with Asian women (vs. Asian men). The results suggest that the gender stereotype about brilliance has a racial component and may be culturally consistent. Overall, these findings add to our knowledge of children's acquisition of the gender stereotype about brilliance in non-Western cultural contexts and highlight the importance of considering multiple social identities to understand the acquisition of stereotypes.

No abstract

We studied the strategy preference of using the egocentric or the allocentric representation in individuals who have acquired the ability to use both representations. Fifty-seven children aged 5–7 years and 53 adults retrieved toys hidden in one of four identical containers in a square room. We varied the type of spatial representation available in four conditions: (1) only self-motion information (egocentric representation); (2) only external landmark cues (allocentric representation); (3) both self-motion and landmark cues (dual representation); (4) self-motion and landmark cues in conflict (conflict trial). We found that, compared with the allocentric representation, the egocentric representation approached maturity earlier in development and was exploited better in early years. More importantly, in the conflict trials, while both children and adults relied more on egocentric representation, still a small portion of participants chose allocentric representation, especially in the adult group. These results provided evidence that egocentric representation is generally preferred more in both young children and adults.

The current study investigated whether children understand the conditions under which another agent would hold uncertain knowledge resulting from inferential processes and, more importantly, whether children can make causal inferences about the relationship between the certainty of an agent’s epistemic states and consequent behavioral strategies. We developed a game in which 3 blocks (2 of identical color) were hidden in 3 boxes. After the content of the 1st box was revealed, the player was asked to choose between 2 strategies: either make an immediate guess or look in the 2nd box before guessing the color of the block in the 3rd box. We varied the hiding sequence of the 3 blocks to create 2 conditions with differing degrees of certainty. Children aged 5 to 7 watched another agent playing the game and reasoned about the individual’s epistemic states and behaviors. Not until 6 years of age did children display stable competence in using the certainty of another agent’s knowledge to predict the agent’s subsequent behaviors. Moreover, the ability to reason from information-seeking behaviors to uncertain epistemic states lagged until 7 years old. Our findings suggest that reasoning between epistemic states and information-seeking behavior undergoes significant developmental changes between ages 5 and 7.

No abstract

This current study examined human children’s and adults’ automatic processing of proportion using a Stroop-like paradigm. Preschool children and university students compared the areas of two sectors that varied not only in absolute areas but also in the proportions they occupied in their original rounds. A congruity effect was found in both age groups. The dimension of proportion interfered with adults’ and children’s area comparison greatly and comparatively. These findings strongly suggest that preschool children automatically represent proportion and provide evidence that this representation is intuitive and independent of formal school instruction.

Previous research in spatial reorientation, which only presented the target location in the corner, has found that adults weighed angles more than wall lengths. We proposed that in previous research, angular cues were available for direct use whereas length cues had to be associated with the left/right sense. We thus investigated whether the directness of cues rather than the cues themselves accounted for the previous findings in the reorientation task. Through navigating a virtual environment, 111 participants were trained to remember target locations in a parallelogram-shaped room and tested in varied versions of the training environment: (a) a reverse-parallelogram environment where angular information conflicted with wall length information, (b) a rhombic environment that preserved only angular information from the training environment, and (c) a rectangular environment that preserved only wall length information. We varied the directness of the two cues in the current study. In addition to the condition with target location in the corner, we included a condition that placed the target positions in the middle of the walls, making the length cues direct. The results revealed that angular information no longer received priority, especially in the wall condition. More interestingly, compared to the group trained with the target positions at walls, the group trained with target positions at corners weighted angular cues more heavily in conflict trials and performed less accurately using length cues in rectangular environments. The results suggest that human adults prefer to rely on direct cues more than indirect cues in the reorientation process. (PsycINFO Database Record

No abstract