Is there a window of opportunity for religiosity? Children and adolescents preferentially recall religious-type cultural representations, but older adults do not

Is there a sensitive period in childhood and adolescence for acquiring religiosity? Does a cultural group’s familiarity with religious-type representations affect individuals’ memory for counterintuitive representations? Boyer’s theory asserts that concepts violating developmentally natural intuitive knowledge structures are more transmittable than other concepts. Counterintuitive representations are prevalent across cultures in religious materials, folktales, and children’s stories. A large age-representative sample in the UK and China was used to investigate the interaction of template- and schema-level effects for transmission biases endemic to cultural groups. The measure of free recall employed a mixing of presentation media for stimuli. Results were analyzed using a hierarchical linear model, with familiarity, counterintuitiveness, and delay as two-level fixed factors, and age and schema-level effects as covariates. Younger persons recalled significantly more counterintuitive stimuli than stimuli consistent with domain-specific intuitive assumptions – a trend reversed for older persons