Knowledge-based representations of artificial intelligence and divine agents: a developmental study across Japan and the United States

Abstract Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have raised foundational questions about how we conceptualise such entities alongside traditional agents like humans and divine beings. Research demonstrates that both children and adults tend to attribute similar mental properties to AI and divine beings across cultures. However, fundamental differences exist in the nature of knowledge attributed to humans, AI and divine entities. Here we showed that Japanese children and adults across developmental stages conceptually cluster AI with divine entities in knowledge-based representational space, whereas U.S. participants maintain clear categorical boundaries between these agents using representational similarity analyses focusing on knowledge attributes. Our findings stand in contrast with previous cross-cultural investigations reporting shared basic agent structures across cultures. These results offer implications for theoretical models of agent categorisation, cross-cultural AI design, and our understanding of how humans reason about increasingly intelligent artificial minds in culturally contingent ways.