Inhibitory control interacts with core knowledge in toddlers' manual search for an occluded object.

Core knowledge theories advocate the primacy of fundamental principles that constrain cognitive development from early infancy. However, there is concern that core knowledge of object properties does not constrain older preschoolers' reasoning during manual search. Here we address in detail both failure and success on two well-established search measures that require reasoning about solidity. We show that poor performance arises from an inability to engage the appropriate search strategy rather than a simple failure of core knowledge. Moreover, we demonstrate that successful search is positively correlated with inhibitory control. We believe that toddlers' manual search for an occluded object reflects a general capacity to deploy inhibition so that search behaviour can be guided by core knowledge.

Individualism and the extended-self: cross-cultural differences in the valuation of authentic objects.

The current studies examine how valuation of authentic items varies as a function of culture. We find that U.S. respondents value authentic items associated with individual persons (a sweater or an artwork) more than Indian respondents, but that both cultures value authentic objects not associated with persons (a dinosaur bone or a moon rock) equally. These differences cannot be attributed to more general cultural differences in the value assigned to authenticity. Rather, the results support the hypothesis that individualistic cultures place a greater value on objects associated with unique persons and in so doing, offer the first evidence for how valuation of certain authentic items may vary cross-culturally.

Changing children's understanding of the brain: a longitudinal study of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures as a measure of public engagement.

Demonstrating the impact of public engagement is an increasingly important activity for today's academics and researchers. The difficulty is that many areas of interest do not lend themselves well to evaluation because the impact of each single intervention can be hard to trace and take time to become manifest. With this in mind, we evaluated a lecture based around the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, "Meet Your Brain," delivered to school children from low performing schools. We compared knowledge about four neuroscience facts one week before, one week after and six weeks after the lecture. Analysis revealed significant knowledge transfer one week after the lecture that was retained five weeks later. We conclude that public engagement through tailored lectures can have significant impact in the moderate term with the potential to leave a lasting impression over a longer period.

When pictures lie: children's misunderstanding of photographs.

In three experiments we examined duality of representation for photographs in young children. Three- to four-year-olds were shown a target item which was then hidden. A sticker was placed on a photograph of this target and children, asked to retrieve the referent, were faced with a choice between a stickered and un-stickered version. Children brought back a stickered distracter object, as if the action to the photograph had modified the object. Control conditions demonstrated that these errors could not be attributed to memory failure or bias towards stickered objects. Experiment 2 indicated that children's errors depended on the sticker being placed directly on the image on the photograph and were not due to signalling which object to choose. A final experiment demonstrated that this effect could be observed under circumstances involving more substantial changes to objects: Here, children acted as if wetting a photograph of an object would cause the object itself to become wet. We interpret these results as evidence that an immature comprehension of photographs fails to take into account the episodic and symbolic referential nature of photographs.

Do children think that duplicating the body also duplicates the mind?

Philosophers use hypothetical duplication scenarios to explore intuitions about personal identity. Here we examined 5- to 6-year-olds' intuitions about the physical properties and memories of a live hamster that is apparently duplicated by a machine. In Study 1, children thought that more of the original's physical properties than episodic memories were present in the duplicate hamster. In Study 2, children thought that episodic memories of the hamster were less likely to duplicate than events captured by a digital camera. Studies 3 and 4 ruled out lower-level explanations of these effects. Study 5 showed that naming the original hamster further reduced the inferred duplication of memories in the second hamster. Taken together, these studies are consistent with the view that young children think that some mental properties are distinct from physical ones.