Assessed 3- to 7-year-old children's sensitivity to logical necessity by contrasting performance in insufficient and sufficient information conditions. A search task used in Experiments 1 and 2 allowed children to search for additional information in insufficient conditions. A judgement condition used in Experiment 2 required a "can't tell"…

Four experiments studied 4- to 6-year-old children's understanding of inferential reasoning as a source of knowledge. To assess understanding that knowledge of relevant premises leads to knowledge of the conclusion, children had to judge the knowledge of another person, who was presented to the child as being aware of two premises. (Author/BN)

Tests the distinction between inferring new categories on the basis of property information (predicted to be difficult) and inferring new properties on the basis of category information (predicted to be easier) among 57 preschool children. (HOD)

Second and third graders and fifth and sixth graders were tested in a very large, unfamiliar environment to determine the relation of their knowledge of an abstract reference frame to performance on a spatial inference task. (HOD)

Describes three experiments that examined how children (4- to 11-year-olds) use their knowledge of the attributes of living things to infer whether particular objects are alive. (HOD)

Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)

Describes two studies investigating the development of recursive thinking in 60 Dutch children five, seven, and nine years of age. The first study replicated earlier research employing a verbal production procedure. The second study used verbal comprehension procedures and concluded that development appears two years earlier than indicated by the…

Cognitive development proceeds through a series of four levels. The first is the single-class level, attained by infants at approximately 1 year of age. At the single-class level, concepts are based on element similarity or convention (for example, images and words for common objects). The second level is the relational level, attained by toddlers…

Second graders, fifth graders, and college students heard 12 stories that varied systematically by situational domain, outcome, and causal attribution. Students were asked to infer the story character's emotion at the end of the story and give reasons for it. Contributions and limitations of Weiner's attribution-emotion model are assessed in light…