Constructing Ideas of the Supernatural

Visual image of God/gods during early childhood

This study examined whether Japanese children have a different visual image of God/gods than children from Western countries, who have an image of an old White man. Study 1 comprised 183, 4-7-year-old Japanese children (93 girls), who had to choose a face that looked like God/gods from among pictures of faces that differed on age (e.g., young Asian man vs. old Asian man), race (e.g., White woman vs. Black woman vs. Asian woman), or gender (e.g., Asian man vs. Asian woman). Children's responses were relatively biased toward old or White faces, but only boys were weakly biased toward male faces. Study 2 confirmed that children did not have a strong gender bias. Japanese children conceptualise God/gods as old or White.

Correspondence in parents' and children's concepts of god: Investigating the role of parental values, religious practices and executive functioning

This study examined the extent to which children's concepts of God correspond with their parents' concepts of God. It also examined how parent‐context factors and children's executive functioning relate to parent–child conceptual similarity. Parent–child dyads from varied religious and racial backgrounds participated. Dyads had the greatest conceptual similarity concerning God's mind‐dependent functions. Though correspondence between parents and children was lowest concerning God's body‐dependent functions, dyads were more similar about those functions when parents engaged in more frequent religious practices with their child and thought God was important. Children's concepts of God were unrelated to religious practices, and parent–child conceptual similarity was unrelated to children's age and executive functioning. Simply put, variation among parents' anthropomorphic concepts of God drove variation in parent–child conceptual similarity. Overall, these findings suggest that embodied concepts of God may be most sensitive to cultural input and that socialization practices provide greater insight into parents' anthropomorphic concepts.

Fairies in the Box: Children’s Perception and Interaction towards Voice Assistants

In recent years, the growing popularity of smart speakers (e.g., Google Home and Alexa) has facilitated young children’s interaction with internet-based devices and provided them with more opportunities to obtain access to online information. This review summarizes the current state of the research by examining smart speakers’ core characteristics, children’s conceptualization and interaction with smart speakers, and the influences on children’s learning and habits. Our review shows that (a) the natural language processing technology and central computing system (Internet) contribute to the uniqueness of smart speakers; (b) although children tend to attribute human characteristics (e.g., smart and friendly) to smart speakers, they might judge these voice assistant devices as neither explicitly living nor nonliving in ontological perception; (c) children’s overattributing certain knowledge (e.g., questions about personal information) to smart speakers does not necessarily mean that this device is believed to be omniscient; and (d) in terms of promoting children’s learning, smart speakers might not be more effective than a real human, and the interaction with smart speakers may not be conducive to children’s maintenance of civilized social norms. Implications for children’s conceptualization and interaction of smart speakers and the design of children-oriented smart agents are also discussed.