Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigated children’s understanding of mental life byanalyzing attributions of perceptual, cognitive, affective, andother capacities. 200 children (7-9y) and 200 adults evaluatedthe mental capacities of beetles or robots. By assessing whichcapacities traveled together when participants disagreed aboutthese controversial “edge cases,” we reconstructed the latentstructure underlying mental capacity judgments from thebottom up—a novel approach to elucidating conceptualstructure among children. For both children and adults, factoranalyses revealed a distinction between social-emotional,physiological, and perceptual-cognitive capacities, hinting atthree fundamental ways of explaining and predicting others’actions: as social partners, biological creatures, and goal-directed agents (each involving related forms of both“experience” and “agency”; Gray et al., 2007). Relative toadults, children attributed greater social-emotional capacitiesto beetles and robots, suggesting that intuitive ontologies ofmental life could be critical for making sense of children’sdeveloping understanding of the social world.