Although scientists understand a great deal about how a child's mental capacities develop from decades of experimental evidence, much less is known about how everyday people perceive this process.
"These beliefs matter because they may shape what parents and teachers expect from the children," said Xianwei Meng, a developmental psychologist at Nagoya University. For instance, if an adult expects a certain ability to be present too early in a child's life, they may blame the child for something they cannot yet do well. On the other hand, if a child develops an ability earlier than expected, an adult may accidentally overlook those skills.
In a new paper in Psychological Science , Meng and his colleagues investigated folk theories of how the mind grows, connecting the fields of folk psychology—the study of people's everyday understanding of mental processes—and developmental science. The team surveyed participants from six different countries, and found that, across cultures and geographies, people generally believed mental development is divided into two parts: (1) experiential and perceptual, and (2) reflective and evaluative reasoning. This finding represents one of the first frameworks for how humans think about mental development and developing minds.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers gathered information on 40 mental abilities and when people thought these abilities would first appear. The survey included perceptual abilities (e.g., detecting smells), cognitive abilities (e.g., carrying out computations), social abilities (e.g., understanding others' feelings), and agentic abilities (e.g., having self-restraint). To gain a global sample, the team recruited hundreds of participants from Australia, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States using an online survey.
The researchers found that, consistently, participants saw mental development as being split into two dimensions. Experiential and perceptual abilities, like feeling emotions or detecting sounds , were believed to blossom in a child's early years. By contrast, reflective and evaluative capacities, like remembering events or making choices , were seen as skills that were acquired as one grows up.
Though there were some cultural nuances in how the survey questions were interpreted, this pattern was observed in all sampled countries. "We expected some cultural differences, so the finding was very unexpected," Meng said.
This structure closely tracks the nature–nurture debate, where scientists have long wondered whether abilities are mostly shaped by biology or nurtured by their environment. To see if the two dimensions align with this framework, researchers asked a sample of Japanese participants to categorize mental abilities as "nature" or "nurture." Indeed, the survey found that abilities believed to be shaped more strongly by nurture were more likely to be classified as reflective–evaluative, whereas those believed to be shaped more strongly by nature were more likely to be classified as perceptual–experiential.
"I think this reflects a basic belief among people that they see human mind development from the view of nature versus nurture," Meng explained.
Despite the consistency of the findings, Meng emphasized that the study has a number of limitations. Only six countries were sampled, meaning that many cultures and experiences were not captured. "We don't know whether this mind perception is universal," he said.
Further, the study focused on general perceptions, rather than attitudes that adults have toward children and infants in their own lives, which Meng said could be "a very interesting future direction" for research. "Adults bring assumptions about development into their interactions with their children," he said, so whether these beliefs end up leading to mistaken assumptions, and in turn affect education , is yet to be understood.
The study also contributes to the psychology of mind perception , a field that has influenced research in areas such as cognition and robotics. To date, mind perception has often been investigated by examining people's intuitions about whether and to what extent different entities, such as cockroaches, robots, and adult humans, possess various mental capacities (Gray et al., 2007; Weisman et al., 2017). Accumulating evidence has converged on the idea that mind perception may have a relatively stable underlying structure.
Better understanding of how people see the mind could potentially push psychology forward, while also showing how "our understanding of the mind is flexible," Meng said. "There is no single fixed view of the mind, because how we perceive it depends on the perspective from which we consider it. I think this is a very important finding."
References
Meng, X., Oguni, R., Nishina, K., Murakami, T., Mizuno, Y., & Wang, J. (2026). How does the mind grow? Cross-cultural intuitive theories of mental development . Psychological Science, 37(7), 493–513.
Gray, H. M., Gray, K., & Wegner, D. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception . Science, 315(5812), 619.
Weisman, K., Dweck, C. S., & Markman, E. M. (2017). Rethinking people's conceptions of mental life . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(43) 11374–11379.
