“If it's in your mind, it's in your knowledge”: Children's developing anatomy of identity

Recent work has investigated children's developing understanding of the anatomical locus of identity. In two studies, we extend this work by exploring the role of the mind as opposed to the brain in children's conceptualization of identity. In Experiment 1, an analysis of natural language indicated that adults use the term mind more frequently than the term brain with reference to identity-related mental processes. Children's output displayed a similar bias. In Experiment 2, we compared the judgments of 5- and 7-year-old children to those displayed by adults. Participants heard stories in which a magical transformation resulted in either a creature with a mismatch between brain and body or a creature with a mismatch between mind and body. Children were more accurate in recognizing the enduring identity of this transformed creature when the transformation resulted in a mismatch between mind and body as compared to brain and body.