Intelligent Tutoring Systems authoring tools are highly complex educational software applications used to produce highly complex software applications (i.e. ITSs). How should our assumptions about the target users (authors) impact the design of authoring tools? In this article I first reflect on the factors leading to my original 1999 article on…

Can young children discriminate impossible events, which cannot happen in reality, from improbable events, which are unfamiliar but could possibly happen in reality? When asked explicitly to categorize these types of events, 4-year-olds (N = 54) tended to report that improbable events were impossible, consistent with prior results (Shtulman &…

Geometry is one of the highest achievements of our species, but its foundations are obscure. Consistent with longstanding suggestions that geometrical knowledge is rooted in processes guiding navigation, the present study examines potential sources of geometrical knowledge in the navigation processes by which young children establish their sense…

The belief that studying mathematics improves reasoning skills, known as the Theory of Formal Discipline (TFD), has been held since the time of Plato. Research evidence supports this idea, at least in the context of students who had chosen to study post-compulsory mathematics. Here we examined the development of reasoning skills in 16- to…

Children's acquisition of tool use abilities is an important part of development but is not yet well understood. This study compares two modes of tool-use learning, observation and individual haptic experience. Two- and 3-year-olds had haptic experience with tools, observed tool use by others, had both haptic and observational experience, or no…

We compared the performance of 3- and 5-year-old children with that of chimpanzees in two tasks requiring collaboration via complementary roles. In both tasks, children and chimpanzees were able to coordinate two complementary roles with peers and solve the problem cooperatively. This is the first experimental demonstration of the coordination of…

The process of effective teaching--teaching that directly leads to student learning of standards-based content--is tenuous at best and easily disrupted by contextual and behavioral factors. In this commentary, I discuss the role of student support and mediation in teacher effectiveness and curricular reform. The most vocal students in physical…

The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet…

Is processing of conceptual information as robust as processing of perceptual information early in development? Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to answer this question. To examine this issue, 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with a flexible categorization task, in which target items (e.g., an open red umbrella) shared category…

Most existing models of dopamine and learning in Parkinson disease (PD) focus on simulating the role of basal ganglia dopamine in reinforcement learning. Much data argue, however, for a critical role for prefrontal cortex (PFC) dopamine in stimulus selection in attentional learning. Here, we present a new computational model that simulates…

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental…

Happe and Loth (2002) describe word learning as a "privileged domain" in the development of a theory of mind. We test this claim in a series of experiments based on the Sally-Anne paradigm. Three- and 4-year-old children's ability to represent others' false beliefs was investigated in tasks that required the child either to predict the actions of…

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2-0, 2-9 and 3-5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3-5 and at 2-9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although…

We investigate the development of two types of prosocial behavior, trust and reciprocity, as defined using a game-theoretical task that allows investigation of real-time social interaction, among 4 age groups from 9 to 25 years. By manipulating the possible outcome alternatives, we could distinguish among important determinants of trust and…

Studies of the development of racial awareness have used--albeit asystematically--stimuli of varying degrees of realism (dolls, drawings, photographs). Although researchers have weighed the advantages and disadvantages of using one or the other type of material with young children, there are no empirical studies that determine whether the nature…