As children learn to navigate the social world, they attend to certain cues that signal affiliation between individuals. One cue that children readily use is similarity such that people who do the same things or share the same characteristics are more likely to be affiliated than people who do different things. Additionally, rituals provide significant cultural information that children readily attend to. However, the importance of these two indicators may differ depending on the observed domain such that certain actions (e.g., eating) contain an abundance of social information without the use of rituals. Across two studies, we ask whether children (ages 4-11 years) differentially use similarity and rituals in determining affiliation. When children saw both ritual and non-ritual actions with objects, they rated those who did the same action, regardless of ritual status, as being affiliated more often than when they did different actions. However, this was not the case when children saw the actors interact with foods. Thus, children do consider similarity to different degrees when viewing food and non-food-related behaviors.

From moment to moment, we perceive objects in the world as continuous despite fluctuations in their image properties due to factors like occlusion, visual noise, and eye movements. The mechanism by which the visual system accomplishes this object continuity remains elusive. Recent results demonstrate that the perception of low-level stimulus features such as orientation and numerosity is systematically biased (i.e. pulled) towards visual input from the recent past. The spatial region over which current orientations are pulled by previous orientations is known as the continuity field, which is temporally tuned for the past 10-15 seconds. This perceptual pull could contribute to the visual stability of low-level features over short time periods, but it does not address how visual stability occurs at the level of complex objects or during visual discontinuities. Here, we examined whether the visual system facilitates stable perception by biasing current perception of objects towards recently seen objects, and whether it operates across disruptions in visibility. First, we used psychophysics to show that the perception of face identity is systematically biased towards identities seen up to several seconds prior, even across changes in viewpoint. This perceptual bias did not depend on subjects’ prior responses or on the method used to measure identity perception. Next, we tested whether this serial dependence, or positive perceptual pull, helps stabilize perceived expression. To test this, observers judged random facial expressions (ranging from happy to sad to angry). We found a pull in perceived expression toward previously seen expressions, but only when the 1-back and current face shared the same identity. Finally, we examined whether the continuity field helps maintain perceived object identity during occlusion. Specifically, we found that the perception of an oriented Gabor that emerged from behind an occluder was significantly pulled towards the random (and unrelated) orientation of the Gabor that was seen entering the occluder. Importantly, this serial dependence was stronger for predictable, continuously moving trajectories, compared to unpredictable ones or static displacements. While this serial dependence in object perception manifests as a misperception, it is adaptive: visual processing echoes the stability of objects in the world to create perceptual continuity. These results provide further evidence for the existence of an object-selective continuity field that helps maintain perceived object stability over time and across visual noise or disruptions.

Food choice is cultural (Fischler, 1988; Millstone & Lang, 2002; Rozin & Rozin, 1981). Indeed, even infants prefer foods liked by members of their group (Shutts et al., 2009) and expect culture to guide food choices (Liberman et al., 2016). People learn not only what to eat, but also what to avoid. Previous work suggests that children do not avoid contaminated foods until 8 years of age (Rozin et al., 1986). Combining these lines of research, we ask how children reason about foods that are contaminated by someone from within versus outside their culture. In Studies 1 & 2, we presented 3- to 11-year-olds with videos of a native speaker and a foreign speaker each liking a food, but varied whose food was contaminated: the foreign speaker’s food (Study 1), or the native speaker’s food (Study 2). In Study 3, children were randomly assigned to watch videos of one speaker (either native or foreign) eat one food (either clean or contaminated) to better understand the mechanisms driving children’s food choices. By 3-years-old, children rated contaminated food as germy and were better at avoiding it when the contamination came from a foreign speaker. However, when contaminated food came from a native speaker, children were not as adept in their understanding of contamination. Children reported that contaminated food from a native speaker was germy and likely to make them sick by 5- to 7-years-old, but did not accurately avoid it until around 7- to 9-years-old.

Children think of national identity as a core part of identity: previous research finds that children are more likely to expect people from the same country to share preferences than people of the same gender (Hussak & Cimpian, 2019). However, do children truly believe that where someone is born defines them in important (and unchanging) ways? In the present set of studies, we extend the study by Hussak and Cimpian (2019) by including targets who are immigrants. In Study 1, we find that children believe that national identity is less stable when considering immigrants compared to nonimmigrants and are willing to state that an individual could maintain two national identities. In Study 2, we replicate past work on an inductive potential task that contrasts national identity with gender when reasoning about nonimmigrants: children were more likely to generalize preferences based on shared national identity than shared gender. When considering immigrants, however, children’s responses were more mixed. Children relied on gender when the gender-match also lived in the same country that the immigrant target moved to, but were at chance when having to choose between a gender-match who lived in the immigrant’s heritage country compared to a non-gender match living in the host country. Thus, rather than essentializing national identity, children may care more about where one lives than where they were born when generalizing preferences. These findings suggest that children expect immigrants to assimilate to and adopt the preferences of their new culture.

To decide whether an act was discriminatory, perceivers often take the status of the victim’s group into account: the same act is more likely to be seen as discrimination when the perpetrator is from a high-status group and the victim is from a low-status group (Major et al., 2002). However, such models fail to account for the fact that many people belong to groups that do not occupy one clear position on the status hierarchy (herein referred to as intermediate identities). For example, biracial people, bicultural people, and bisexual people may share some characteristics with a prototypical minority group and other characteristics with a majority group. Where do these targets fall in reference to their prototypicality as a victim (and therefore, their likelihood of being seen as facing discrimination)? Across three experiments (Ntotal = 1765), we investigated situations in which perceivers did or did not see bisexual individuals as targets of discrimination. In Study 1, participants found it plausible for both gay/lesbian and bisexual targets to face discrimination based on their sexual orientation. However, when evaluating scenarios that directly compared a bisexual target to a lesbian target (Studies 2 & 3a), participants were more likely to say that the lesbian target had faced discrimination. Interestingly, even in cases with direct comparison, participants expected a bisexual man and a gay man to be equally likely to have faced discrimination (Study 3b). Overall, results indicate that whether a bisexual target is perceived as a victim of discrimination depends on context cues that may reflect the target’s relative status.