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…

Existing evidence suggests that children, when they first pass standard theory-of-mind tasks, still fail to understand the essential aspectuality of beliefs and other propositional attitudes: such attitudes refer to objects only under specific aspects. Oedipus, for example, believes Yocaste (his mother) is beautiful, but this does not imply that…

Educators often use concrete objects to help children understand mathematics concepts. However, findings on the effectiveness of concrete objects are mixed. The present study examined how two factors--perceptual richness and established knowledge of the objects--combine to influence children's counting performance. In two experiments, preschoolers…

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)

A study showed that 5- to 15-year-old children first employed Heider's commission rule, then his intentionality rule, and finally the foreseeability rule at about 11 years of age. Results suggest that both the Heider and Piaget attribution research traditions were correct in part. (RH)

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)

The performance of children ages three through eight years on a series of class-inclusion problems was examined in two studies. Three patterns of performance were observed: three- and four-year-olds responded in an approximately haphazard pattern, five- and six-year-olds tended to be consistently wrong, and seven- and eight-year-olds showed a…

Four- and five-year-old children were asked to compare the burning times of pairs of partially synchronous lights differing in intensity, bulb size, or both. (Author/MP)

Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

In the first experiment, 16 kindergarten children were tested on vertical/horizontal and oblique discriminations in symmetrical and asymmetrical alignments. When stimuli were asymmetrically aligned, the former discrimination was learned as rapidly as the latter. The second experiment demonstrated that the influence of configurational cues in…

Visual and auditory processing of complex sentences was examined among 8- through 11-year-olds. Findings suggested a U-shaped learning pattern for on-line processing of restrictive relative clauses. Off-line accuracy scores showed different patterns for good and poor comprehenders. Incorrect local attachment strategy use was related to sentence…