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Luke McGuire; Tina Bagus; Alexander G. Carter; Emma Fry; Nadira S. Faber – Child Development, 2025
The present study examined the justifications used by children, adolescents, and adults to justify eating animals. Children (n = 100, M[superscript age] = 9.82, SD = 0.77, female n = 49) as compared to adolescents (n = 76, M[superscript age] = 14.0, SD = 1.62, female n = 36) and adults (n = 113, M[superscript age] = 44.1, SD = 14.4, female n = 54)…
Descriptors: Abstract Reasoning, Childrens Attitudes, Eating Habits, Animals
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Amanda C. Brandone; Wyntre Stout – Child Development, 2024
As they learn to navigate the social world, children construct frameworks to interpret others' behavior. The present studies examined two such frameworks: a mentalistic framework, which construes behavior as driven by internal mental states; and a normative framework, which presumes people act in accordance with social norms. Participants included…
Descriptors: Children, Adults, Behavior Theories, Childrens Attitudes
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Bardikoff, Nicole; Sabbagh, Mark A. – Child Development, 2021
An important aspect of executive functioning is the ability to flexibly switch between behavioral rules. This study explored how considering the multidimensionality of objects affects behavioral rule switching in 3-year-old children. In Study 1 (N = 40), children who participated in a brief game separating and aggregating an object's dimensions…
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Task Analysis, Executive Function, Games
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Goddu, Mariel K.; Sullivan, J. Nicholas; Walker, Caren M. – Child Development, 2021
The ability to consider multiple possibilities forms the basis for a wide variety of human-unique cognitive capacities. When does this skill develop? Previous studies have narrowly focused on children's ability to prepare for incompatible future outcomes. Here, we investigate this capacity in a causal learning context. Adults (N = 109) and 18- to…
Descriptors: Toddlers, Cognitive Processes, Cognitive Development, Causal Models
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Goddu, Mariel K.; Lombrozo, Tania; Gopnik, Alison – Child Development, 2020
Previous research suggests that preschoolers struggle with understanding abstract relations and with "reasoning by analogy." Four experiments find, in contrast, that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 168) are surprisingly adept at relational and analogical reasoning within a causal context. In earlier studies preschoolers routinely favored images…
Descriptors: Preschool Children, Logical Thinking, Abstract Reasoning, Causal Models
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Arslan, Burcu; Verbrugge, Rineke; Taatgen, Niels; Hollebrandse, Bart – Child Development, 2020
One-hundred-six 5-year-olds' (M[subscript age] = 5;6; SD = 0.40) were trained with second-order false belief tasks in one of the following conditions: (a) "feedback with explanation"; (b) "feedback without explanation"; (c) "no feedback"; (d) "active control." The results showed that there were significant…
Descriptors: Thinking Skills, Abstract Reasoning, Beliefs, Training
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Lin, Xin; Powell, Sarah R. – Child Development, 2023
In the present study, we investigated the impact of a word-problem intervention in retention and acquisition of knowledge after the intervention ended. We based analyses upon Grade 4 students experiencing mathematics difficulty (average age at pretest = 8.77) who received one of two variants of a word-problem intervention (with [n = 111] vs.…
Descriptors: Elementary School Students, Grade 4, Elementary School Mathematics, Word Problems (Mathematics)