The present study tested the hypothesis that verbal labels support category induction by providing compact hypotheses. Ninety-seven 4- to 6-year-old children (M = 63.2 months; 46 female, 51 male; 77% White, 8% more than one race, 4% Asian, and 3% Black; tested 2018) and 90 adults (M = 20.1 years; 70 female, 20 male) in the Midwestern United States…

Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016-2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided…

This 5-year longitudinal study examined whether high mathematics achievers in primary school had cognitive advantages before entering formal education. High mathematics achievement was defined as performing above Pc 90 in Grades 1 and 3. The predominantly White sample (M[subscript age] in preschool: 64 months) included 31 high achievers (12 girls)…

Children perform worse than adults on tests of cognitive flexibility, which is a component of executive function. To assess what aspects of a cognitive flexibility task (cued switching) children have difficulty with, investigators tested where eye gaze diverged over age. Eye-tracking was used as a proxy for attention during the preparatory period…

Cognitive effort is costly and this cost likely influences the activities in which children engage. Yet, little is known about how school-age children perceive cognitive effort. The subjective value of cognitive effort, that is, how valuable or costly effort is perceived, was investigated in seventy-three 7- to 12-year-olds using an effort…

Four studies explored the abilities of 80 adults and 180 children (4-9 years), from predominantly middle-class families in the Northeastern United States, to use information about machines' observable functional capacities to infer their internal, "hidden" mechanistic complexity. Children as young as 4 and 5 years old used machines'…

Children ages 6 to 13 and college students were asked to remember length relationships for three pairs of sticks. For six- and seven-year-olds, relationships between interlinked pairs were much more difficult to retain than were relationships between unrelated pairs. (Author/MP)

Examines stability of individual differences in behaviorally induced heart-rate reactivity in 34 boys presented a cognitive task. Task-related heart-rate reactivity revealed substantial and highly reproducible individual differences in heart-rate reactivity independent of subjects' task performance. (Author/DB)

Demonstrated that six-year-olds performed as well as 17-year-olds in discriminating self-generated memories from memories that were the result of external presentation. However, six-year-olds were not as adept as nine-year-olds in discriminating what they had said earlier from what they had only thought. (Author/MP)

Undertaken within the framework of the best example theory of categorization, this study investigates category acquisition as a function of initial exposure to only good exemplars and as a function of exposure to single as opposed to multiple exemplars. Six severely handicapped children, ranging in age from 8 to 18 years, participated. (Author/MP)

Examined the development of the ability of 5-, 9-, and 13-year-old children to produce elemental and complex facial movements intentionally. (Author/DB)

The purpose of this research was to examine developmental changes in the knowledge about what variables affect performance on the incidental learning task. Kindergarteners, second graders, fifth graders, and college students indicated on a rating scale how many animals a hypothetical person would remember under easy and difficult levels of each…

Examined differences between five-, seven-, and nine-year-olds' ability to estimate their counting accuracy for large set sizes on tasks of three levels of counting difficulty. With increasing age, children's estimates of their counting accuracy increasingly corresponded to their actual counting accuracy. (Author/DB)