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The assumption that natural and social categories have deeper "essences" is a fundamental feature of the conceptual system, with wide-ranging consequences for behavior. What are the developmental origins of this assumption? We propose that essentialism emerges in part from a bias in the process of generating explanations that leads reasoners to overuse inherent or intrinsic features. Consistent with this proposal, the inherence bias in 4-year-olds' explanations predicted the strength of their essentialist beliefs (Study 1; N = 64), and manipulations of the inherence bias in 4- to 7-year-olds (Studies 2 and 3; N = 112 each) led to subsequent changes in the essentialist beliefs of children who attended to the manipulation. These findings contribute to our understanding of the origins of essentialism., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The ability to take information learned about one object (e.g., a cat) and extend it to other objects (e.g., a tiger, a lion) makes human learning efficient and powerful. How are these inductive generalizations performed? Fisher, Godwin, and Matlen (2015) proposed a developmental mechanism that operates exclusively over the perceptual and semantic features of the objects involved (e.g., furry, carnivorous); this proposed mechanism does not use information concerning these objects' category memberships. In the present commentary, we argue that Fisher and colleagues' experiments cannot differentiate between their feature-based mechanism and its category-based competitors. More broadly, we suggest that any proposal that does not take into account the central role of category representations in children's mental lives is likely to mischaracterize the development of inductive generalization. The key question is not whether, but how, categories are involved in children's generalizations.

The mappings between the words of a language and their meanings are arbitrary. There is, for example, nothing inherently dog-like about the word dog. And yet, building on prior evidence (e.g., Brook, 1970; Piaget, 1967), the six studies reported here (N=1062) suggest that both children and (at least to some extent) adults see a special "fit" between objects and their names, as if names were particularly suitable or appropriate for the objects they denote. These studies also provide evidence for a novel proposal concerning the source of these nominal fit beliefs. Specifically, beliefs about nominal fit may be a byproduct of the heuristic processes that people use to make sense of the world more generally (Cimpian & Salomon, 2014a). In sum, the present studies provide new insights into how people conceive of language and demonstrate that these conceptions are rooted in the processes that underlie broader explanatory reasoning., (Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Several proposals in the literature on conceptual development converge on the claim that information about kinds of things in the world has a privileged status in children's cognition, insofar as it is acquired, manipulated, and stored with surprising ease. Our goal in the present studies (N = 440) was to test a prediction of this claim. Specifically, if the early cognitive system privileges kind (or generic) information in the proposed ways, then learning new facts about kinds should be so seamless that it is often accompanied by an impression that these facts were known all along. To test this prediction, we presented 4- to 7-year-old children with novel kind-wide and individual-specific facts, and we then asked children whether they had prior knowledge of these facts. As predicted, children were under the impression that they had known the kind-wide facts more often than the individual-specific facts, even though in reality they had just learned both (Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 5). Importantly, learning facts about (nongeneric) plural sets of individuals was not similarly accompanied by heightened knew-it-all-along errors (Experiment 4), highlighting the privileged status of kind information per se. Finally, we found that young children were able to correctly recognize their previous ignorance of newly learned generic facts when this ignorance was made salient before the learning event (Experiment 6), suggesting that children's frequent knew-it-all-along impressions about such facts truly stem from metacognitive difficulties rather than being a methodological artifact. In sum, these 6 studies indicate that learning information about kinds is accompanied by heightened knew-it-all-along errors. More broadly, this evidence supports the view that early cognition privileges kind representations., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that-beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations-people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal of the task, leading to a characteristic pattern of errors. Specifically, participants were asked to memorize two types of novel facts: quantified facts about sets of kind members (e.g., facts about all or many stups) and generic facts about entire kinds (e.g., facts about zorbs as a kind). Moreover, half of the facts concerned properties that are typically generalizable to an animal kind (e.g., eating fruits and vegetables), and half concerned properties that are typically more idiosyncratic (e.g., getting mud in their hair). We predicted that-because of the hypothesized bias-participants would spontaneously generalize the quantified facts to the corresponding kinds, and would do so more frequently for the facts about generalizable (rather than idiosyncratic) properties. In turn, these generalizations would lead to a higher rate of quantified-to-generic memory errors for the generalizable properties. The results of four experiments (N = 449) supported this prediction. Moreover, the same generalizable-versus-idiosyncratic difference in memory errors occurred even under cognitive load, which suggests that the hypothesized bias operates unnoticed in the background, requiring few cognitive resources. In sum, this evidence suggests the presence of a powerful bias to draw generalizations about kinds., (Copyright © 2014 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)