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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Oct 21, 2025

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Experience is Instrumental in Tuning a Link Between Language and Cognition: Evidence from 6- to 7- Month-Old Infants' Object Categorization

Published on: April 19, 2017

People's Intuitions About Innateness.

Iris Berent¹, Melanie Platt¹, Gwendolyn M Sandoboe¹

¹Department of Psychology, Northeastern University.

Open Mind : Discoveries in Cognitive Science

|September 6, 2021

Summary

People intuitively believe cognitive traits, like thinking, are less innate than sensorimotor or emotive traits. This bias in reasoning about the origins of knowledge persists across different species and age groups.

Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Developmental Psychology
Philosophy of Mind

Background:

The origins of knowledge, particularly the debate on innate versus learned information, remains a central and controversial question in science.
Previous research has explored the innateness of various traits, but less is understood about potential cognitive biases influencing these judgments.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether human cognitive biases influence reasoning about the innateness of knowledge and cognitive traits.
To compare judgments of innateness for cognitive traits versus noncognitive (sensorimotor and emotive) traits across different contexts.

Main Methods:

Eight experiments were conducted, comparing adult and infant traits, and analyzing published infant experiment data.
Participants reasoned about the innateness of cognitive traits (associated with thinking) versus noncognitive traits.

Keywords:

core knowledge dualism essentialism innateness

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Further experiments explored human, bird, and alien traits presented as innate to assess the generalizability of findings.

Main Results:

People consistently rated cognitive traits as less likely to be innate compared to noncognitive traits, even when presented with evidence of innateness.
A stronger association with 'thinking' led to lower ratings of 'innateness' for a given trait.
This selective bias in judging the origins of knowledge was observed across different species and experimental conditions.

Conclusions:

Human cognition exhibits a selective bias against attributing innateness to knowledge-related (cognitive) traits.
This bias suggests that our intuitive understanding of how knowledge originates may be systematically skewed.
Further research is needed to explore the developmental and evolutionary underpinnings of this cognitive bias.