Animal metacognition is an active, growing research area, and one part of metacognition is flexible information-seeking behavior. In Roberts et al. (2009), pigeons failed an intuitive information-seeking task. They basically refused, despite multiple fostering experiments, to view a sample image before attempting to find its match. Roberts et al.…

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting (i.e., unbelieving) supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined…

Prior research indicates that young children are promiscuously teleological, attributing purpose not only to artifacts, but also to living and non-living natural entities. This study further examines the role of function in children's reasoning about different object kinds by indirectly probing children's intuitions about what types of entities…