When people remember together, what one person says can affect what others report. The size of this effect is dependent on the characteristics of the people and how they express their beliefs. The power relationship among people affects much of their social cognition, including the size of this "memory conformity" effect. Some research…

Misinformation exposure can cause inaccurate beliefs and memories. These unwanted outcomes can be mitigated when misinformation reminders--veracity-labeled statements that repeat earlier-read false information--appear before corrections with true information. The present experiment used eye tracking to examine the role of attention while encoding…

Information problem solving (IPS) is an important twenty-first century skill, but it is lacking at all age levels. One type of information problem, those of an ill-structured nature that require multiple iterations of (re)defining problems and formulating emerging solutions, can be particularly challenging but have received less attention in the…

According to Bayesian models of judgment, testimony from independent informants has more evidential value than dependent testimony. Three experiments investigated learners' sensitivity to this distinction. Each experiment used a social version of the balls-and-urns task, in which participants judged which of two urns was the most likely source of…

Differences in the sequence with which children pass the tasks in Wellman and Liu's (2004) theory of mind (ToM) battery is increasingly bringing into question the universal and cultural specifics of children's developing understanding of others' minds. Children from China, Iran, and Turkey pass the knowledge access (KA) task of the battery earlier…

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

The standard view on Theory of Mind (ToM) is that the mastery of the false belief (FB) task around age 4 marks the ontogenetic emergence of full-fledged meta-representational ToM. Recently, a puzzling finding has emerged: Once children master the FB task, they begin to fail true belief (TB) control tasks. This finding threatens the validity of FB…

The current experiments examined the creation of nonbelieved true and false memories after imagining bizarre and familiar actions using the imagination inflation procedure (Goff & Roediger, 1998). In both experiments, participants took part in three sessions. In Session 1, participants had to perform or imagine simple familiar actions (e.g.,…

Humans can attribute beliefs to others. However, it is unknown to what extent this ability results from an innate biological endowment or from experience accrued through child development, particularly exposure to language describing others' mental states. We test the viability of the language exposure hypothesis by assessing whether models…

A major problem in human cognition is to understand how newly acquired information and long-standing beliefs about the environment combine to make decisions and plan behaviors. Over-dependence on long-standing beliefs may be a significant source of suboptimal decision-making in unusual circumstances. While the contribution of long-standing beliefs…

When reporting from memory, people may often be asked unanswerable questions--questions for which the correct answer has never been encoded. These unanswerable questions should be met with an "I don't know" response. Previous research has shown that a manipulation commonly used to enhance memory at retrieval--context…

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb…

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4.…

Background: We have previously presented two educational interventions aimed to diminish causal illusions and promote critical thinking. In both cases, these interventions reduced causal illusions developed in response to active contingency learning tasks, in which participants were able to decide whether to introduce the potential cause in each…

This study investigated whether task instruction affected comprehension of multiple conflicting-view texts after controlling for a number of individual difference variables and whether the effects of task instruction varied as a result of post-reading assessment tasks. Recruited from a First-Year Composition course, 64 participants received a task…