The ability to categorize is fundamental to human cognition. Categorization helps us efficiently structure our knowledge and form expectations about new experiences. When encountering novel information, we often assume that category members share inherent similarities, using prior knowledge to predict new members’ attributes. While this reasoning is useful in many domains, its application to social groups (e.g., "women" or "athletes") can contribute to the formation of stereotypes. By the time they reach preschool, children are already highly attuned to social groups and use them as a basis for making inferences about individuals. Our research seeks to understand the roots of this tendency by exploring when and how infants begin to draw social-group based inferences about people's traits and behaviors.
A false belief occurs when someone holds an incorrect understanding of a situation because they lack key information. For example, if a child sees a toy being moved while another person is out of the room, they must recognize that the absent person will still believe the toy is in its original location. Understanding false beliefs is a crucial milestone in cognitive development because it reflects a child’s ability to see the world from another person’s perspective and predict their actions based on what they think rather than what is objectively true.
Beyond identifying when false-belief understanding emerges, we also explore how social experiences—such as the social group of the character a child is reasoning about—influence its development.