Pleased to announce my new open access paper out in Developmental Psychology: The Development of the “First Thing That Comes to Mind” with @xphilosopher.bsky.social and @ebonawitz.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-25569-001.html #CogSci #PsychSciSki #DevSci (1/10) - ThreadSky

jfkominsky.bsky.social • 12 days ago

Pleased to announce my new open access paper out in Developmental Psychology:
The Development of the “First Thing That Comes to Mind”

with @xphilosopher.bsky.social and @ebonawitz.bsky.social

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-25569-001.html

#CogSci #PsychSciSki #DevSci

(1/10)

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jfkominsky.bsky.social•12 days ago

Past work has found that children tend to confuse what's descriptively frequent with what's prescriptively good. Adults have no trouble keeping them separate, but they seem to combine them when asked for the "first thing that comes to mind" or what's "normal"
(2/10)

jfkominsky.bsky.social•12 days ago

We were interested in understanding how kids represent descriptive and prescriptive information. We tested three hypotheses:

1. Kids mostly represent prescriptive information
2. Kids mostly represent descriptive information
3. Kids have an undifferentiated representation that combines both (3/10)

jfkominsky.bsky.social•12 days ago

We used a kid-friendly version of a paradigm from Bear et al. (2020) in which we showed kids a bunch of novel objects that varied along a single feature dimension (length) but also in prescriptive value (e.g., longer=better).

(4/10)

jfkominsky.bsky.social•12 days ago

We then asked 4-9-year-olds and adults for a prediction of a random sample, or the "first one that comes to mind".

Adults' random sample predictions reflected unbiased descriptive frequency, and their first-to-mind judgments were between the peak of the frequency distribution and the ideal. (5/xx)

jfkominsky.bsky.social•12 days ago

6-9-year-olds' first-to-mind judgments were almost identical to adults, but critically, their random sample predictions were ALSO influenced by prescriptive information, and were in fact almost identical to their first-to-mind judgments. (6/10)

jfkominsky.bsky.social•12 days ago

In Exp. 2 we showed that this is really about *positive* prescriptive information. If you only provide information about what's prescriptively *worse*, 6-9-year-olds and adults give you unbiased frequency judgments for both random sample predictions and first-to-mind judgments. (7/10)

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