The Development of the “First Thing That Comes to Mind”

When children encounter information about the world that is descriptive (e.g., frequency distributions) or prescriptive (e.g., value judgments), can they keep track of both types of information together? Do they, like adults, integrate these two kinds of information to come up with the “first thing that comes to mind”? Can children separate these types of information when needed? In two experiments, we examined how children (N = 397, ages 4–9 years, fluent English speakers mostly from North America, recruited online) and adults (N = 189, U.S. English speakers, recruited online) produce both “first-to-mind” judgments and predictions about random samples. In Experiment 1, providing information about whether being longer or shorter made a fictional tool better or worse led adults to provide first-to-mind judgments that were biased toward the prescriptive ideal, but unbiased random sample predictions. However, 6–9-year-old children provided judgments that were biased by the prescriptive ideal in both cases. In Experiment 2, with 6–9-year-olds and adults, we manipulated whether the prescriptive information focused exclusively on positive (i.e., only “better”) or negative (i.e., only “worse”) properties. In the positive-focus condition, all age groups showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on first-to-mind judgments, but only 6–7-year-olds showed an effect of prescriptive ideal on random sample predictions. However, in the negative-focus condition, there was no effect of prescriptive information on either type of judgments for any age group, including adults. We discuss what changes in development in the ability to represent different kinds of information and apply the best kind of information to a specific task.