Journal
COGNITIVE PROCESSING
Volume 18, Issue 4, Pages 375-385Publisher
SPRINGER HEIDELBERG
DOI: 10.1007/s10339-017-0814-9
Keywords
Children; Power; Space; Representation
Categories
Funding
- Projects Planning in Shanghai Philosophy and Social Sciences Research [2012JJY001]
- School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University
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Previous evidence demonstrates that power is mentally represented as vertical space by adults. However, little is known about how power is mentally represented in children. The current research examines such representations. The influence of vertical information (motor cues) was tested in both an explicit power evaluation task (judge whether labels refer to powerless or powerful groups) and an incidental task (judge whether labels refer to people or animals). The results showed that when power was explicitly evaluated, vertical motor responses interfered with responding in children and adults, i.e., they responded to words representing powerful groups faster with the up than the down cursor key (and vice versa for powerless groups). However, this interference effect disappeared in the incidental task in children. The findings suggest that children have developed a spatial representation of power before they have been taught power-space associations formally, but that they do not judge power spontaneously.
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