There is an ongoing debate over the psychophysical functions that best fit human data from numerical estimation tasks. To test whether one psychophysical function could account for data across diverse tasks, we examined 40 kindergartners, 38 first graders, 40 second graders and 40 adults' estimates using two fully crossed 2 × 2 designs, crossing…

The developmental trajectory of the use of morphemes is still unclear. We investigated the emergence of morphological effects on visual word recognition in German in a large sample across the complete course of reading acquisition in elementary school. To this end, we analyzed lexical decision data on a total of 1,152 words and pseudowords from a…

In 4 studies, the authors examined how intuitions about the relative difficulties of the sciences develop. In Study 1, familiar everyday phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics were pretested in adults, so as to be equally difficult to explain. When participants in kindergarten, Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, and college were…

Adults overestimate the detail and depth of their explanatory knowledge, but through providing explanations they recognize their initial illusion of understanding. By contrast, they are much more accurate in making self-assessments for other kinds of knowledge, such as for procedures, narratives, and facts. Two studies examined this "illusion of…