Accumulating evidence suggests that there is a spontaneous preference for numerical, compared to non-numerical (e.g., cumulative surface area), information. However, given a paucity of research on the perception of non-numerical magnitudes, it is unclear whether this preference reflects a specific bias towards number, or a general bias towards the…

Statistical learning allows us to discover myriad structures in our environment, which is saturated with information at many different levels--from items to categories. How do children learn different levels of information--about regularities that pertain to items and the categories they come from--and how does this differ from adults? Studies on…

Children achieve better long-term language outcomes than adults. However, it remains unclear whether children actually learn language "more quickly" than adults during real-time exposure to input--indicative of true superior language learning abilities--or whether this advantage stems from other factors. To examine this issue, we…

From early in development, race biases how children think about gender--often in a manner that treats Black women as less typical and representative of "women in general" than White or Asian women. The present study (N = 89, ages 7-11; predominately Hispanic, White, and multi-racial children) examined the generalizability of this…

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants…

The shape bias, a preference for mapping new word labels onto the shape rather than the color or texture of referents, has been postulated as a word-learning mechanism. Previous research has shown deficits in the shape bias in children with autism even though they acquire sizeable lexicons. While previous explanations have suggested the atypical…

There is considerable evidence that labeling supports infants' object categorization. Yet in daily life, most of the category exemplars that infants encounter will remain unlabeled. Inspired by recent evidence from machine learning, we propose that infants successfully exploit this sparsely labeled input through "semi-supervised…

The overall pattern of vocabulary development is relatively similar across children learning different languages. However, there are considerable differences in the words known to individual children. Historically, this variability has been explained in terms of differences in the input. Here, we examine the alternate possibility that children's…

How does improving children's ability to label set sizes without counting affect the development of understanding of the cardinality principle? It may accelerate development by facilitating subsequent alignment and comparison of the cardinal label for a given set and the last word counted when counting that set (Mix et al., 2012). Alternatively,…

Two experiments examined whether 4-month-olds (n = 120) who were induced to assign two objects to different categories would then be able to take advantage of these contrastive categorical encodings to individuate and track the objects. In each experiment, infants first watched functional demonstrations of two tools, a masher and tongs (Experiment…

Infants are curious learners who drive their own cognitive development by imposing structure on their learning environment as they explore. Understanding the mechanisms by which infants structure their own learning is therefore critical to our understanding of development. Here we propose an explicit mechanism for intrinsically motivated…

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We…

Recent studies with infants and adults demonstrate a facilitative role of labels in object categorization. A common interpretation is that labels highlight commonalities between objects. However, direct evidence for such a mechanism is lacking. Using a novel object category with spatially separate features that are either of low or high…

The present research investigated young children's automatic encoding of two social categories that are highly relevant to adults: gender and race. Three- to 6-year-old participants learned facts about unfamiliar target children who varied in either gender or race and were asked to remember which facts went with which targets. When participants…

The present study examined whether perceptual individuation training with other-race faces could reduce preschool children's implicit racial bias. We used an "angry = outgroup" paradigm to measure Chinese children's implicit racial bias against African individuals before and after training. In Experiment 1, children between 4 and 6 years…