How we can prepare children to find insights and cognitive agency in a world of ever shrinking opportunities to learn how things work. From infancy onwards, children show a natural interest in the hidden causes of surface patterns. But that kind of childhood is being derailed by a world that is no longer causally transparent. Younger generations seek different kinds of explanations now, value different kinds of experts, and are more prone to outsource their understandings. In many cases, they don’t realize how much they have surrendered their intellectual efficacy. What does this all mean for their learning? In The Disappearance of Insight, Frank Keil investigates how rapid technological change is shaping the world around us--and what this all means for our children and their futures. Explanation and understanding are at the heart of a cognitively meaningful life. But the things we can explain and want to understand are dramatically changing. In many cases, over the past fifty years or so, those things—and parts of things—have shifted from easily interpretable components to opaque ones. In 1960, for example, the insides of thermostats, cameras, and clocks revealed how they worked. Today, their insides are indecipherable circuit boards. The author shows why insight and explanations are at the heart of higher-level human cognition; explores how artifacts and their roles in evolving cultures can shape thought and developing minds; and does much more, in this fascinating deep dive into cognition, learning, and AI.

Consensus-based social learning strategies often outcompete other strategies in evolutionary models. But while formal proofs suggest that consensus’ reliability is compromised when individual judgments are not independent, this makes for a notoriously implausible assumption in the biological world: the people we learn from are constantly learning from each other as well. How do we avoid being misled by consensus? We present three experiments and a computational model examining commonsense reasoning about how people’s public and private judgments are influenced by the consensus and social status of those around them. Results suggest that while people realize that these two factors can cause others’ public and private judgments to diverge, their own trust in public consensus depends on how accurately they believe it reflects their informants’ true beliefs.

Collaboration can make collective judgments more accurate than individual judgments, but it also comes with costs in time, effort, and social cohesion. Here we focus on time costs. How do we estimate these costs? In two experiments, we introduce children and adults to two teams in which the teammates disagree about the optimal solution to a novel problem, and ask which team would need more time to reach a consensus decision. We find that all ages expect slower decisions from teams with more people or factions, and expect the number of factions to matter more than the number of people. But only adults expect decisions initially endorsed by a stronger faction to be faster than those endorsed by a weaker faction. Results are discussed in context of children's reasoning about power and consensus in group dynamics.

People are more inclined to agree with certain causal statements when a person acts intentionally than when a person acts unintentionally or without agency. Most existing research has assumed that this effect is to be explained in terms of the operation of people’s causal cognition. We propose a different explanation which involves a linguistic phenomenon involving the impact of agency on people’s judgments about a broader class of sentences, including non- causal sentences. Study 1 shows that the effect arises for both causal and non-causal sentences. The remaining studies show that the effect arises only when the subject of the sentence is animate (Study 2), that the effect arises both for outcomes with negative valence and outcomes with neutral valence (Study 3) and that the effect is driven by whether or not a person exercises agentive control over her body, rather than whether or not she intends the particular outcome of her action (Study 4). We conclude with a formal linguistic theory that captures these effects.

People judge the strength of cause-and-effect relationships as a matter of routine, and often do so in the absence of evidence about the covariation between cause and effect. Here, we examine the possibility that explanatory power is used as a heuristic for making these judgments. Our argument proceeds in three steps. First, we show that explanatory power and causal strength judgments for sets of historical events are almost perfectly correlated (Study 1). Next, we intervene on explanatory power without changing the target causal relation by manipulating explanatory scope—the number of effects predicted by an explanation. Scope manipulations lead to downstream consequences for causal strength judgments (Study 2), supported by item-by-item correlations between causal strength and explanatory power (Study 3). Finally, we show that explanatory power has causal signatures even in the non-causal domain of mathematics (Study 4). These results suggest that explanatory power may be a useful heuristic for estimating causal strength in the absence of statistical evidence.

What makes an object complex? Complexity comes in many different forms. Some objects are visually complex but mechanistically simple (e.g., a hairbrush). Other objects are the opposite; they look simple but work in a complex way (e.g., an iPhone). Is one kind of complexity more fundamental to how we represent, attend to, and remember objects? Although most existing psychological research on complexity focuses on visual complexity, we argue that mechanistic complexity may be more consequential: Across five pre-registered experiments (N=780 adults), we show that mechanistic complexity not only predicts explicit judgments, but also drives visual attention and memory. Thus, representations of object complexity — and object representations more broadly — rely on more than just external appearance.

Should you first teach about the purpose of a microwave or about how it heats food? Adults strongly prefer explanations to present function before mechanism and information about a whole to precede information about its component parts. Here we replicate those preferences (Study 1). Using the same stimuli, we then ask whether those pedagogical preferences reflect ease of learning of labels, function, or mechanism. Surprisingly, explanations that accord with function-before-mechanism and whole-before-part structure show no learning benefits to participants compared to other participants who see lessons that violate one or both intuitions (Study 2). Even when potential scaffolds are removed (i.e., diagrams) the preferred pedagogical order does not predict better learning (Study 3). Finally, explanatory order has only modest effects on experiential outcomes (e.g., curiosity, frustration; Study 4). In all cases, all orders of presentation support learning in comparison to controls and are not constrained by either ceiling or floor effects. Reasons for the clash between intuitions about learning and actual outcomes are explored.

Causal explanations are central to cognitive development. Once considered beyond the grasp of young children, causal reasoning is now understood to be present in infants, driving curiosity and learning. The search for causal explanations underlying recurring patterns is evident in nonverbal forms. Causal explanations are diverse, varying in granularity, spanning different content domains, and encompassing both deterministic and probabilistic forms. These explanations support counterfactual reasoning, diagnostic thinking, and learning. The emergence of causal explanatory thought in infants is suggested by their responses to anomalies and by the development of exploratory behaviors. In the preschool years, children build upon early abilities to request, evaluate, and generate explanations. The decline of causal explanation-seeking in young schoolchildren can be dramatic and seems to arise from a convergence of social, cultural, and motivational factors. Overall, the development of causal explanations is essential to cognitive growth and mature understanding, with enduring influences on learning and reasoning.

As adults, we intuitively understand how others' goals influence their information-seeking preferences. For example, you might recommend a dense book full of mechanistic details to someone trying to learn about a topic in-depth, but a more lighthearted book filled with surprising stories to someone seeking entertainment. Moreover, you might do this with confidence despite knowing few details about either book. Even though we offer or receive such recommendations frequently as adults, we know little about how the ability to evaluate and recommend information sources to others develops. Two studies examined how children (6-9 years, Eastern U.S. residents, n = 311) and adults (U.S. residents, n = 180) select mechanistic and entertaining information sources for others depending on their goals. Participants recommended books containing mechanistic information to agents who wanted to learn and entertaining information to agents who wanted to have fun. In contrast to adults who strongly favored entertaining books, children recommended both kinds of books equally to a generally curious agent. These results suggest children can infer others' information-seeking preferences based on their goals and recommend appropriate information sources to satisfy those goals despite possessing little topical knowledge themselves. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., lion), artifactual (e.g., hammer), and institutional (e.g., police officer) categories, aiming to identify if people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270 American children, ages 4 through 10: 140 girls, 129 boys, 1 not reported; 59% White, 3% Black, 10% Asian, 1 Native American, 17% multiracial or another race, 11% unreported. We also conducted two studies with 360 American adults recruited from Amazon mechanical Turk. In all four studies we found that children and adults judged institutional categories as more socially constituted than artifactual categories (in all studies) but as less subjective (in 3 of 4 studies). Whereas younger and older children’s beliefs about subjectivity were similar, younger and older children expressed different beliefs about social constitution. Young children judged none of the category domains as socially constituted; older children differentiated between the three domains. These results support the conceptual independence of subjectivity and social constitution and suggest that concepts of institutions and artifacts differ.

We examine whether people conceptualize organized groups as having at least two parts: In addition to members (e.g., Alice), they also have social structures (i.e., roles and relations). If groups have members and social structures, then numerically distinct groups can have the same members if they differ in their structures. In Studies 1-4, participants numerically distinguished groups that had the same members when they had different structures. Participants numerically distinguished even when groups had the same function—the same people playing chess together Monday and Tuesday can be numerically distinct groups. In Study 4, we compare clubs to tables, and find that participants numerically distinguish tables by their structures too (i.e., the configuration of their parts) even when they have the same parts (which can be disassembled and then reassembled with ease). In Study 5, we find that participants rate groups as existing in space and time like concrete objects, suggesting that participants represent groups as at least partially concrete, such that groups have at least two parts (their structures and their members). Finally, in Study 6, we show that people will judge the same person as exemplary with respect to one group but condemnable with respect to another—even when those groups have the same members.

People generally prefer functional explanations over mechanistic ones. This preference might arise from attributing greater value to functional information. However, instead of an overall preference for functional explanations, people might simply expect functional information to precede mechanistic information. Here, we ask whether people have such preferences for the order of functional and mechanistic information in explanations and how those preferences might arise. In a first set of studies, we show that adults do in fact prefer functional information to precede mechanistic. In a second set of studies, we show that people have a more general preference for explanations to address the whole before parts. Finally, we show that the preference for function to precede mechanism may be related to the broader whole-before-parts preference.

While coexistence is often seen as posing a competition or tension between two explanatory systems, at least in the case of functional and mechanistic explanations, fruitful cooperation may be more common. Functional and mechanistic explanations also exhibit especially dramatic patterns of variation across broad domains of thought such as living kinds, artifacts, nonliving natural kinds, and institutional kinds. Cooperation is much more common in of some these explanatory domains than others. All such considerations, however, must take care in characterizing the nature of coexistence itself. Coexistence, broadly considered, can take on several contrasting forms as well as being attributed to imposter cases that are not in fact real instances of two full-fledged explanations. A better understanding of both cooperative and competitive explanatory coexistence will require a systematic unpacking of different kinds of coexistence as well as impure cases that only partly resemble true cases of coexistence.

Limits on mental speed entail speed-accuracy tradeoffs for problem-solving, but memory and perception are accurate on much faster timescales. While response times drive inference across the behavioral sciences, they may also help laypeople interpret each othejognrs' everyday behavior. We examined children's (ages 5 to 10) use of agents' response time to infer the source and quality of their knowledge. In each trial, children saw a pathfinding puzzle presented to an agent, who claimed to have solved it after either 3s or 20s. In Experiment 1 (n = 135), children used agents' response speed to distinguish between memory, perception, and novel inference. In Experiment 2 (n = 135), children predicted that fast responses would be inaccurate, but were less skeptical of slow agents. In Experiment 3 (n = 128), children inferred task complexity from agents' speed. Our findings suggest that the simple intuition that thinking takes time may scaffold everyday social cognition.

This study examines the acquisition of Japanese numeral classifiers in Japanese preschool children, ages 3 to 6, with a primary emphasis on developing comprehension ability. Numeral classifiers, widely distributed in languages of East and Southeast Asia and the New World, are a group of morphemes that usually occur adjacent to quantity expressions. The selection of numeral classifiers is determined by the inherent semantic properties of the noun whose quantity is being specified, suggesting that developing patterns of comprehension should be linked to underlying patterns of semantic and conceptual development. Previous research claims that children acquire certain distributional patterns very early but that the acquisition of the semantic system is a very slow process. We argue instead that different techniques and stimulus contrast sets reveal a much greater sensitivity to semantic relations in young children than was previously considered possible. Reasons for the apparent slowness in classifier acquisition are also discussed.

Communication between social learners can make a group collectively "wiser" than any individual, but conformist tendencies can also distort collective judgment. We asked whether intuitions about when communication is likely to improve or distort collective judgment could allow social learners to take advantage of the benefits of communication while minimizing the risks. In three experiments (n = 360), 7- to 10-year old children and adults decided whether to refer a question to a small group for discussion or "crowdsource" independent judgments from individual advisors. For problems affording the kind of 'demonstrative' reasoning that allows a group member to reliably correct errors made by even a majority, all ages preferred to consult the discussion group, even compared to a crowd ten times as large-consistent with past research suggesting that discussion groups regularly outperform even their best members for reasoning problems. In contrast, we observed a consistent developmental shift towards crowdsourcing independent judgments when reasoning by itself was insufficient to conclusively answer a question. Results suggest sophisticated intuitions about the nature of social influence and collective intelligence may guide our social learning strategies from early in development.

To successfully navigate the world, we cannot simply accept everything we hear as true. We must think critically about others' testimony, believing only sources who are well-informed and trustworthy. This ability is especially crucial in early childhood, a time when we both learn the most, and have the least prior knowledge we can fall back upon to verify others' claims. While even young children evaluate testimony by considering whether agents' firsthand experiences license their claims, much of the time, our informants do not possess firsthand knowledge. When agents transmit information learned from others (rather than discovered firsthand), can children also evaluate their testimony's social basis? Across 3 experiments (N = 390), we manipulate the number of primary sources originating a claim, and the number of secondary sources repeating it. We find that by age 6, children understand that a claim is only as reliable as its original source, endorsing claims supported by more primary (rather than secondary) sources. While young preschoolers already understand the link between firsthand perceptual access and knowledge, these results suggest that a full understanding of testimony's social basis may be later-developing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).