A few months ago, I took my 4-year-old daughter to the Ghent Design Museum which hosts an extensive collection of designer furniture. Some of this furniture looks positively bizarre, such as a couch made of banana peels. About 5 months later, I asked my daughter if she could remember anything of the museum, and she ventured ‘there was a flying chair’ (i.e., a chair that hung suspended by a transparent nylon string). This made me wonder whether there is any systematic research on whether young children, like adults from various cultures, are better able to remember ideas that are minimally counterintuitive, i.e. things that violate our basic ontological expectations of how things are supposed to behave.<\/p>\n
I know that even young infants can show surprise at such unexpected events (e.g., looking time experiments in which infants stare longer at objects that seem to defy gravity), but I am unaware of any systematic experimental research that investigates whether young children are also able to remember counterintuitive things better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few months ago, I took my 4-year-old daughter to the Ghent Design Museum which hosts an extensive collection of designer furniture. Some of this furniture looks positively bizarre, such as a couch made of banana peels. About 5 months later, I asked my daughter if she could remember anything of the museum, and she […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":681,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n