Tempering the tension between science and intuition

Scientific ideas can be difficult to access if they contradict earlier-developed intuitive theories; counterintuitive scientific statements like "bubbles have weight" are verified more slowly and less accurately than closely-matched intuitive statements like "bricks have weight" (Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012). Here, we investigate how context and instruction influences this conflict. In Study 1, college undergraduates (n = 100) verified scientific statements interspersed with images intended to prime either a scientific interpretation of the statements or an intuitive one. Participants primed with scientific images verified counterintuitive statements more accurately, but no more quickly, than those primed with intuitive images. In Study 2, college undergraduates (n = 138) received instruction that affirmed the scientific aspects of the target domain and refuted common misconceptions. Instruction increased the accuracy of participants' responses to counterintuitive statements but not the speed of their responses. Collectively, these findings indicate that scientific interpretations of a domain can be prioritized over intuitive ones but the conflict between science and intuition cannot be eliminated altogether.

Children's susceptibility to online misinformation

Children have a reputation for credulity that is undeserved; even preschoolers have proven adept at identifying implausible claims and unreliable informants. Still, the strategies children use to identify and reject dubious information are often superficial, which leaves them vulnerable to accepting such information if conveyed through seemingly authoritative channels or formatted in seemingly authentic ways. Indeed, children of all ages have difficulty differentiating legitimate websites and news stories from illegitimate ones, as they are misled by the inclusion of outwardly professional features such as graphs, statistics, and journalistic layout. Children may not be inherently credulous, but their skepticism toward dubious information is often shallow enough to be overridden by the deceptive trappings of online misinformation.

Improbable but possible: Training children to accept the possibility of unusual events

Young children tend to deny the possibility of events that violate their expectations, including events that are merely improbable, like making onion-flavored ice cream or owning a crocodile as a pet. Could this tendency be countered by teaching children more valid strategies for judging possibility? We explored this question by training children aged 4-12 (n = 128) to consider either the similarity between the target event and unusual events that have actually occurred or causal mechanisms that might bring the target event about. Both trainings increased children's acceptance of improbable events but only for the types of events addressed during training. Older children were more likely to accept improbable events, as were children who scored higher on a measure of cognitive reflection, but neither age nor cognitive reflection moderated the effects of training. These findings indicate that children can use both similarity and causality to assess possibility, but the use of this information is highly circumscribed, further demonstrating how robustly children conflate improbability with impossibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Could it? Should it? Cognitive reflection facilitates children's reasoning about possibility and permissibility

Children can be unduly skeptical of events that violate their expectations, claiming that these events neither could happen nor should happen even if the events violate no physical or social laws. Here, we explored whether children's reasoning about possibility and permissibility-modal cognition-is aided by cognitive reflection, or the disposition to privilege analysis over intuition. A total of 99 children aged 4 to 11 years judged the possibility and permissibility of several hypothetical events, and their judgments were compared with their scores on a developmental version of the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D). Children's CRT-D scores predicted their ability to differentiate possible events from impossible ones and their ability to differentiate impermissible events from permissible ones as well as their ability to differentiate possibility from permissibility in general. Such differentiations were predicted by children's CRT-D scores independent of age and executive function. These findings suggest that mature modal cognition may require the ability to reflect on, and override, the intuition that unexpected events cannot happen.

Development of a Classification System for Live Surgical Feedback

Importance

Live feedback in the operating room is essential in surgical training. Despite the role this feedback plays in developing surgical skills, an accepted methodology to characterize the salient features of feedback has not been defined.

Objective

To quantify the intraoperative feedback provided to trainees during live surgical cases and propose a standardized deconstruction for feedback.

Design, Setting, and Participants

In this qualitative study using a mixed methods analysis, surgeons at a single academic tertiary care hospital were audio and video recorded in the operating room from April to October 2022. Urological residents, fellows, and faculty attending surgeons involved in robotic teaching cases during which trainees had active control of the robotic console for at least some portion of a surgery were eligible to voluntarily participate. Feedback was time stamped and transcribed verbatim. An iterative coding process was performed using recordings and transcript data until recurring themes emerged.

Exposure

Feedback in audiovisual recorded surgery.

Main Outcomes and Measures

The primary outcomes were the reliability and generalizability of a feedback classification system in characterizing surgical feedback. Secondary outcomes included assessing the utility of our system.

Results

In 29 surgical procedures that were recorded and analyzed, 4 attending surgeons, 6 minimally invasive surgery fellows, and 5 residents (postgraduate years, 3-5) were involved. For the reliability of the system, 3 trained raters achieved moderate to substantial interrater reliability in coding cases using 5 types of triggers, 6 types of feedback, and 9 types of responses (prevalence-adjusted and bias-adjusted κ range: a 0.56 [95% CI, 0.45-0.68] minimum for triggers to a 0.99 [95% CI, 0.97-1.00] maximum for feedback and responses). For the generalizability of the system, 6 types of surgical procedures and 3711 instances of feedback were analyzed and coded with types of triggers, feedback, and responses. Significant differences in triggers, feedback, and responses reflected surgeon experience level and surgical task being performed. For example, as a response, attending surgeons took over for safety concerns more often for fellows than residents (prevalence rate ratio [RR], 3.97 [95% CI, 3.12-4.82]; P = .002), and suturing involved more errors that triggered feedback than dissection (RR, 1.65 [95% CI, 1.03-3.33]; P = .007). For the utility of the system, different combinations of trainer feedback had associations with rates of different trainee responses. For example, technical feedback with a visual component was associated with an increased rate of trainee behavioral change or verbal acknowledgment responses (RR, 1.11 [95% CI, 1.03-1.20]; P = .02).

Conclusions and Relevance

These findings suggest that identifying different types of triggers, feedback, and responses may be a feasible and reliable method for classifying surgical feedback across several robotic procedures. Outcomes suggest that a system that can be generalized across surgical specialties and for trainees of different experience levels may help galvanize novel surgical education strategies.

Stay away, Santa: Children's beliefs about the impact of COVID-19 on real and fictional beings

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's beliefs about supernatural beings, like Santa and the Tooth Fairy. Because these beings cannot be observed, children's beliefs about the impact of COVID-19 on them must be based on their underlying theories of disease transmission and prevention rather than on experience. In the summer of 2020, N = 218 U.S. children between the ages of 3 and 10 years (M = 81.2 months) were asked to rate supernatural beings' susceptibility to COVID-19, and the extent to which these beings should engage in disease-mitigating behaviors, such as social distancing and mask wearing. Many children believed supernatural beings were susceptible to COVID-19. However, children rated the need for supernatural beings to engage in disease-mitigating behaviors as higher than the beings' disease susceptibility, indicating a disconnect between their conceptions of the causal relations between disease-mitigating behavior and disease prevention. Children's belief that a particular supernatural being could be impacted by COVID-19 was best predicted by the number of human-like properties they attributed to it, regardless of the child's age. Together, these findings suggest that although young children fail to appreciate specific pathways of disease transmission, they nonetheless understand disease as a bodily affliction, even for beings whose bodies have never been observed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Using Real-time Feedback To Improve Surgical Performance on a Robotic Tissue Dissection Task

Background

There is no standard for the feedback that an attending surgeon provides to a training surgeon, which may lead to variable outcomes in teaching cases.

Objective

To create and administer standardized feedback to medical students in an attempt to improve performance and learning.

Design setting and participants

A cohort of 45 medical students was recruited from a single medical school. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups. Both completed two rounds of a robotic surgical dissection task on a da Vinci Xi surgical system. The first round was the baseline assessment. In the second round, one group received feedback and the other served as the control (no feedback).

Outcome measurements and statistical analysis

Video from each round was retrospectively reviewed by four blinded raters and given a total error tally (primary outcome) and a technical skills score (Global Evaluative Assessment of Robotic Surgery [GEARS]). Generalized linear models were used for statistical modeling. According to their initial performance, each participant was categorized as either an innate performer or an underperformer, depending on whether their error tally was above or below the median.

Results and limitations

In round 2, the intervention group had a larger decrease in error rate than the control group, with a risk ratio (RR) of 1.51 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.07-2.14; p = 0.02). The intervention group also had a greater increase in GEARS score in comparison to the control group, with a mean group difference of 2.15 (95% CI 0.81-3.49; p < 0.01). The interaction effect between innate performers versus underperformers and the intervention was statistically significant for the error rates, at F(1,38) = 5.16 (p = 0.03). Specifically, the intervention had a statistically significant effect on the error rate for underperformers (RR 2.23, 95% CI 1.37-3.62; p < 0.01) but not for innate performers (RR 1.03, 95% CI 0.63-1.68; p = 0.91).

Conclusions

Real-time feedback improved performance globally compared to the control. The benefit of real-time feedback was stronger for underperformers than for trainees with innate skill.

Patient summary

We found that real-time feedback during a training task using a surgical robot improved the performance of trainees when the task was repeated. This feedback approach could help in training doctors in robotic surgery.

Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists?

Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from all-powerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptualize persons, intuitively representing their minds as separable from their bodies. Infants have both a folk psychology (for representing the mental states of intentional agents) and a folk physics (for representing the properties of objects) but are said to apply only folk psychology to persons. The two modes of construal become integrated with development, but their functional specialization and initial independence purportedly make it natural for people of all ages to entertain beliefs in disembodied minds. We critically evaluate this thesis. We integrate studies of both children and adults on representations of intentional agents, both natural and supernatural, beliefs about the afterlife and souls, mind transfer, body duplication, and body transplantation. We show that representations of minds and bodies are integrated from the start, that conceptions of religious beings as disembodied are not evident in early ages but develop slowly, and that early-acquired conceptions of religious beings as embodied are not revised by theological conceptions of such beings as disembodied. We argue that belief in disembodied beings requires cultural learning-a learned dualism. We conclude by suggesting that disembodied beings may be prevalent not because we are developmentally predisposed to entertain them but because they are counterintuitive and thus have a social transmission advantage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning Evolution by Collaboration

Collaboration can be an effective means of learning, but is it effective in domains where collaborators rely on conceptually distinct forms of reasoning? We explored this question in the domain of evolution, where many students construe evolution as the uniform transformation of all members of a population rather than the selective survival and reproduction of a subset. College undergraduates (n = 174) completed an assessment of their evolutionary reasoning by themselves (pretest) and with a partner (dyad test); some (n = 44) also completed an assessment several months later (posttest). Higher-scoring partners pulled up lower-scoring partners to achieve a dyad score equivalent to the higher-scoring partner's pretest score. Lower-scoring partners retained a score boost when working alone at posttest. These findings indicate that students who hold different views of evolution are able to collaborate effectively, and such collaboration yields long-term learning gains for partners with lower levels of understanding.

The Plausible Impossible: Chinese Adults Hold Graded Notions of Impossibility

Events that violate the laws of nature are, by definition, impossible, but recent research suggests that people view some violations as “more impossible” than others (Shtulman & Morgan, 2017). When evaluating the difficulty of magic spells, American adults are influenced by causal considerations that should be irrelevant given the spell’s primary causal violation, judging, for instance, that it would be more difficult to levitate a bowling ball than a basketball even though weight should no longer be a consideration if contact is no longer necessary for support. In the present study, we sought to test the generalizability of these effects in a non-Western context – China – where magical events are represented differently in popular fiction and where reasoning styles are often more holistic than analytic. Across several studies, Chinese adults (n = 466) showed the same tendency as American adults to honor implicit causal constraints when evaluating the plausibility of magical events. These findings suggest that graded notions of impossibility are shared across cultures, possibly because they are a byproduct of causal knowledge.

Whitewashing Nature: Sanitized Depictions of Biology in Children's Books and Parent-Child Conversation

The biological world includes many negatively valenced activities, like predation, parasitism, and disease. Do children's books cover these activities? And how do parents discuss them with their children? In a content analysis of children's nature books (Study 1), we found that negatively valenced concepts were rarely depicted across genres and reading levels. When parents encountered negative information in books (Studies 2-3), they did not omit it but rather elaborated on it, adding their own comments and questions, and their children (ages 3-11) were more likely to remember the negative information but less likely to generalize that information beyond the animal in the book. These findings suggest that early input relevant to biological competition may hamper children's developing understanding of ecology and evolution.

The Development of Cognitive Reflection in China

Cognitive reflection is the tendency to override an intuitive response so as to engage in the reflection necessary to derive a correct response. Here, we examine the emergence of cognitive reflection in a culture that values nonanalytic thinking styles, Chinese culture. We administered a child-friendly version of the cognitive reflection test, the CRT-D, to 130 adults and 111 school-age children in China and compared performance on the CRT-D to several measures of rational thinking (belief bias syllogisms, base rate sensitivity, denominator neglect, and other-side thinking) and normative thinking dispositions (actively open-minded thinking and need for cognition). The CRT-D was a significant predictor of rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions in both children and adults, as previously found in American samples. Adults' performance on the CRT-D correlated with their performance on the original CRT, and children's performance on the CRT-D predicted rational thinking and normative thinking dispositions even after adjusting for age. These results demonstrate that cognitive reflection, rational thinking, and normative thinking dispositions converge even in a culture that emphasizes holistic, nonanalytic reasoning.

Developing an Understanding of Science

Young children are adept at several types of scientific reasoning, yet older children and adults have difficulty mastering formal scientific ideas and practices. Why do “little scientists” often become scientifically illiterate adults? We address this question by examining the role of intuition in learning science, both as a body of knowledge and as a method of inquiry. Intuition supports children's understanding of everyday phenomena but conflicts with their ability to learn physical and biological concepts that defy firsthand observation, such as molecules, forces, genes, and germs. Likewise, intuition supports children's causal learning but provides little guidance on how to navigate higher-order constraints on scientific induction, such as the control of variables or the coordination of theory and data. We characterize the foundations of children's intuitive understanding of the natural world, as well as the conceptual scaffolds needed to bridge these intuitions with formal science.

Piloerection is not a reliable physiological correlate of awe

In scientific and popular literature, piloerection (e.g. goosebumps) is often claimed to accompany the experience of awe, though this correlation has not been tested empirically. Using two pre-registered and independently collected samples (N = 210), we examined the objective physiological occurrence of piloerection in response to awe-inducing stimuli. Stimuli were selected to satisfy three descriptors of awe, including perceptual vastness, virtual reality, and expectancy-violating events. The stimuli reliably elicited self-reported awe to a great extent, in line with previous research. However, awe-inducing stimuli were not associated with the objective occurrence of piloerection. While participants self-reported high levels of goosebumps and "the chills," there was no physical evidence of this response. These results suggest that piloerection is not reliably connected to the experience of awe-at least using stimuli known to elicit awe in an experimental setting.

Children's Cognitive Reflection Predicts Conceptual Understanding in Science and Mathematics

The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is a widely used measure of adults' propensity to engage in reflective analytic thought. The CRT is strongly predictive of many diverse psychological factors but unsuitable for use with developmental samples. Here, we examined a children's CRT, the CRT-Developmental (CRT-D), and investigated its predictive utility in the domains of science and mathematics. School-age children (N = 152) completed the CRT-D, measures of executive functioning, measures of rational thinking, and measures of vitalist-biology and mathematical-equivalence concepts. CRT-D performance predicted conceptual understanding in both domains after we adjusted for children's age, executive functioning, and rational thinking. These findings suggest that cognitive reflection supports conceptual knowledge in early science and mathematics and, moreover, demonstrate the theoretical and practical importance of children's cognitive reflection. The CRT-D will allow researchers to investigate the development, malleability, and consequences of children's cognitive reflection.

How Children's Cognitive Reflection Shapes Their Science Understanding

Learning science requires contending with intuitions that are incompatible with scientific principles, such as the intuition that animals are alive but plants are not or the intuition that solids are composed of matter but gases are not. Here, we explore the tension between science and intuition in elementary school-aged children and whether that tension is moderated by children's tendency to reflect on their intuitions. Our participants were children between the ages of 5 and 12 years (n = 142). They were administered a statement-verification task, in which they judged statements about life and matter as true or false, as well as a children's Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D), in which they answered "brain teasers" designed to elicit an intuitive, yet inaccurate, response that could be corrected upon further reflection. Participants also received a tutorial on the scientific properties of life or matter, sandwiched between two blocks of the statement-verification task. We found that performance on the statement-verification task, which pitted scientific conceptions against intuitive conceptions (e.g., "cactuses are alive"), was predicted by performance on the CRT-D, independent of age. Children with higher levels of cognitive reflection verified scientific statements more accurately before the tutorial, and they made greater gains in accuracy following the tutorial. These results indicate that children experience conflict between scientific and intuitive conceptions of a domain in the earliest stages of acquiring scientific knowledge but can learn to resolve that conflict in favor of scientific conceptions, particularly if they are predisposed toward cognitive reflection.

Competing Explanations of Competing Explanations: Accounting for Conflict Between Scientific and Folk Explanations

People who hold scientific explanations for natural phenomena also hold folk explanations, and the two types of explanations compete under some circumstances. Here, we explore the question of why folk explanations persist in the face of a well-understood scientific alternative, a phenomenon known as explanatory coexistence. We consider two accounts: an associative account, where coexistence is driven by low-level associations between co-occurring ideas in experience or discourse, and a theory-based account, where coexistence reflects high-level competition between distinct sets of causal expectations. We present data that assess the relative contributions of these two accounts to the cognitive conflict elicited by counterintuitive scientific ideas. Participants (134 college undergraduates) verified scientific statements like "air has weight" and "bacteria have DNA" as quickly as possible, and we examined the speed and accuracy of their verifications in relation to measures of associative information (lexical co-occurrence of the statements' subjects and predicates) and theory-based expectations (ratings of whether the statements' subjects possess theory-relevant attributes). Both measures explained a significant amount of variance in participants' responses, but the theory-based measures explained three to five times more. These data suggest that the cognitive conflict elicited by counterintuitive scientific ideas typically arises from competing theories and that such ideas might be made more intuitive by strengthening scientific theories or weakening folk theories.

Theories of God: Explanatory coherence in religious cognition

Representations of God in art, literature, and discourse range from the highly anthropomorphic to the highly abstract. The present study explored whether people who endorse anthropomorphic God concepts hold different religious beliefs and engage in different religious practices than those who endorse abstract concepts. Adults of various religious affiliations (n = 275) completed a questionnaire that probed their beliefs about God, angels, Satan, Heaven, Hell, cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, human suffering, and human misdeeds, as well as their experiences regarding prayer, worship, and religious development. Responses to the questionnaire were analyzed by how strongly participants anthropomorphized God in a property-attribution task. Overall, the more participants anthropomorphized God, the more concretely they interpreted religious ideas, importing their understanding of human affairs into their understanding of divine affairs. These findings suggest not only that individuals vary greatly in how they interpret the same religious ideas but also that those interpretations cohere along a concrete-to-abstract dimension, anchored on the concrete side by our everyday notions of people.

Distant lands make for distant possibilities: Children view improbable events as more possible in far-away locations

Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5-7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about ordinary events (Experiment 2) and either judged whether the events could happen in a distant country or locally (Experiments 1A and 2) or with their location unspecified (Experiment 1B). Children were more likely to judge that extraordinary events could happen in a distant country than when the same events were described locally or with location unspecified; also, older children were more likely to deny these events could happen when they were local compared with when their location was unspecified. We also found some evidence that manipulating distance affects judgments more strongly for improbable events than for impossible one. Together, the findings show that children's assessments of whether hypothetical events are possible are affected by the geographic context of the events. The findings are consistent with accounts holding that children normally assess whether hypothetical events are possible by drawing on their knowledge of the ordinary world but further suggest that children modify this approach when considering events in distant lands. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Science Is Awe-Some: The Emotional Antecedents of Science Learning

Scientists from Einstein to Sagan have linked emotions like awe with the motivation for scientific inquiry, but no research has tested this possibility. Theoretical and empirical work from affective science, however, suggests that awe might be unique in motivating explanation and exploration of the physical world. We synthesize theories of awe with theories of the cognitive mechanisms related to learning, and offer a generative theoretical framework that can be used to test the effect of this emotion on early science learning.

The relation between essentialist beliefs and evolutionary reasoning

Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection. The present study investigated whether such beliefs are impediments to learning this concept as well. Participants (43 children aged 4-9 and 34 adults) were asked to judge the variability of various behavioral and anatomical properties across different members of the same species. Adults who accepted within-species variation-both actual and potential-were significantly more likely to demonstrate a selection-based understanding of evolution than adults who denied within-species variation. The latter demonstrated an alternative, incorrect understanding of evolution and produced response patterns that were both quantitatively and qualitatively similar to those produced by preschool-aged children. Overall, it is argued that psychological essentialism, although a useful bias for drawing species-wide inductions, leads individuals to devalue within-species variation and, consequently, to fail to understand natural selection.

Variation in the anthropomorphization of supernatural beings and its implications for cognitive theories of religion

The cognitive study of religion has been highly influenced by P. Boyer's (2001, 2003) claim that supernatural beings are conceptualized as persons with counterintuitive properties. The present study tests the generality of this claim by exploring how different supernatural beings are conceptualized by the same individual and how different individuals conceptualize the same supernatural beings. In Experiment 1, college undergraduates decided whether three types of human properties (psychological, biological, physical) could or could not be attributed to two types of supernatural beings (religious, fictional). On average, participants attributed more human properties to fictional beings, like fairies and vampires, than to religious beings, like God and Satan, and they attributed more psychological properties than nonpsychological properties to both. In Experiment 2, 5-year-old children and their parents made both open-ended and closed-ended property attributions. Although both groups of participants attributed a majority of human properties to the fictional beings, children attributed a majority of human properties to the religious beings as well. Taken together, these findings suggest that anthropomorphic theories of supernatural-being concepts, though fully predictive of children's concepts, are only partially predictive of adults' concepts.

Improbable or impossible? How children reason about the possibility of extraordinary events

The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, children frequently denied the possibility of events that adults judged improbable but not impossible. Three additional experiments varied the manner in which possibility judgments were elicited and confirmed the robustness of preschoolers' tendency to judge improbable events impossible. Overall, it is argued that children initially mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur for evidence that no such circumstances exist.

Qualitative differences between naïve and scientific theories of evolution

Philosophers of biology have long argued that Darwin's theory of evolution was qualitatively different from all earlier theories of evolution. Whereas Darwin's predecessors and contemporaries explained adaptation as the transformation of a species' "essence," Darwin explained adaptation as the selective propagation of randomly occurring mutations within a population. The present study explored the possibility of a parallel between early "transformational" theories of evolution and modern naïve theories. Forty-two high school and college students and three evolutionary biologists were tested on their understanding of six evolutionary phenomena: variation, inheritance, adaptation, domestication, speciation, and extinction. As predicted, a plurality of participants demonstrated transformational reasoning inconsistent with natural selection. Correlational analyses revealed that participants who demonstrated transformational reasoning were as internally consistent as participants who demonstrated an understanding of natural selection, with the exception of one group of participants who appeared to have assimilated two heuristics--"survival of the fittest" and "acquired traits are not inherited"--into an otherwise transformational framework. These findings suggest that the widespread and early-developing tendency to essentialize biological kinds precludes students from conceptualizing species as populations of individuals differentially affected by the environment.