Essentialism is the intuition that category membership relies on an invisible essence. Essentialist thinking about social categories is most evident in young children, while comparable methods do not reveal essentialist thinking about social groups in adult participants. However, previous work has found that essentialist thinking about gender was…

Recent evidence in adults indicates that object perceptual processing is affected by the competition between action representations. In the absence of a specific motor plan, reachable objects associated with distinct structural (grasping) and functional (using) actions (e.g., calculator) elicit slower judgments than objects associated with similar…

Similar estimation biases appear in a wide range of quantitative judgments, across many tasks and domains. Often, these biases (those that occur, for example, when adults or children indicate remembered locations of objects in bounded spaces) are believed to provide evidence of Bayesian or rational cognitive processing, and are explained in terms…

From early in development, segmenting events unfolding in the world in meaningful ways renders input more manageable and facilitates interpretation and prediction. Yet, little is known about how children process action structure in events composed of multiple coarse-grained actions. More importantly, little is known about the time course of action…

We examined young adults' essentialist reasoning about gender categories. Previous developmental results suggest that until age 9 or 10, children show marked essentialist reasoning about gender, but this disappears by early adulthood. In contrast, results from social cognition suggest that essentialist thinking about social categories persists…

Two experiments examined processes underlying cognitive inflexibility in set-shifting tasks typically used to assess the development of executive function in children. Adult participants performed a Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST) that requires shifting from categorizing by one dimension (e.g., color) to categorizing by a second orthogonal…