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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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Butler, Lucas P.; Gibbs, Hailey M.; Levush, Karen C. – Child Development, 2020
In learning about the world children must not only make inferences based on minimal evidence, but must deal with conflicting evidence and question those initial inferences when they appear to be wrong. Four experiments (N = 144) found that young children were significantly more likely to revise their initial inferences when conflicting evidence…
Descriptors: Young Children, Cognitive Processes, Evidence, Inferences
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Miele, David B.; Son, Lisa K.; Metcalfe, Janet – Child Development, 2013
Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (M[subscript age] = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders…
Descriptors: Metacognition, Evaluative Thinking, Intelligence, Elementary School Students
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Seiver, Elizabeth; Gopnik, Alison; Goodman, Noah D. – Child Development, 2013
Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…
Descriptors: Inferences, Prior Learning, Attribution Theory, Toys
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Koenig, Melissa A. – Child Development, 2012
Children's sensitivity to the quality of epistemic reasons and their selective trust in the more reasonable of 2 informants was investigated in 2 experiments. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N = 90) were presented with speakers who stated different kinds of evidence for what they believed. Experiment 1 showed that children of all age groups…
Descriptors: Evidence, Semantics, Preschool Children, Child Development
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Taylor, Marianne G.; Rhodes, Marjorie; Gelman, Susan A. – Child Development, 2009
Two studies (N = 456) compared the development of concepts of animal species and human gender, using a switched-at-birth reasoning task. Younger children (5- and 6-year-olds) treated animal species and human gender as equivalent; they made similar levels of category-based inferences and endorsed similar explanations for development in these 2…
Descriptors: Animals, Classification, Environmental Influences, Inferences
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McColgan, Kerry L.; McCormack, Teresa – Child Development, 2008
Six experiments examined children's ability to make inferences using temporal order information. Children completed versions of a task involving a toy zoo; one version required reasoning about past events (search task) and the other required reasoning about future events (planning task). Children younger than 5 years failed both the search and the…
Descriptors: Cues, Cognitive Processes, Problem Solving, Inferences
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Filippova, Eva; Astington, Janet Wilde – Child Development, 2008
This study describes the development of social reasoning in school-age children. An irony task is used to assess 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds' (N = 72) and adults' (N = 24) recursive understanding of others' minds. Guttman scale analysis demonstrates that in order to understand a speaker's communicative intention, a child needs to recognize the…
Descriptors: Figurative Language, Language Aptitude, Cognitive Development, Social Cognition
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Liu, David; Gelman, Susan A.; Wellman, Henry M. – Child Development, 2007
Trait attribution is central to people's naive theories of people and their actions. Previous developmental research indicates that young children are poor at predicting behaviors from past trait-relevant behaviors. We propose that the cognitive process of behavior-to-behavior predictions consists of two component processes: (1) behavior-to-trait…
Descriptors: Social Theories, Behavior, Personality Traits, Prediction
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Jipson, Jennifer L.; Gelman, Susan A. – Child Development, 2007
This study tests the firm distinction children are said to make between living and nonliving kinds. Three, 4-, and 5-year-old children and adults reasoned about whether items that varied on 3 dimensions (alive, face, behavior) had a range of properties (biological, psychological, perceptual, artifact, novel, proper names). Findings demonstrate…
Descriptors: Inferences, Differences, Young Children, Adults
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Hayes, Brett K.; Younger, Katherine – Child Development, 2004
Three experiments examined the changes in category representation that take place when children use exemplars for tasks other than classification. In Experiments 1 and 2, 6- and 10-year-old children learned to classify exemplars of a novel category and then used the same exemplars in an inferential prediction task. In a subsequent classification…
Descriptors: Classification, Task Analysis, Children, Inferences
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Gelman, Susan A.; And Others – Child Development, 1986
Tests the distinction between inferring new categories on the basis of property information (predicted to be difficult) and inferring new properties on the basis of category information (predicted to be easier) among 57 preschool children. (HOD)
Descriptors: Cognitive Development, Cognitive Processes, Concept Formation, Inferences
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Bergstrom, Brian; Moehlmann, Bianca; Boyer, Pascal – Child Development, 2006
Children's learning--in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well--relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while…
Descriptors: Cultural Influences, Cultural Relevance, Cognitive Processes, Ethics
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Halford, Graeme S.; And Others – Child Development, 1986
Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)
Descriptors: Cognitive Ability, Cognitive Development, Cognitive Measurement, Cognitive Processes
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Pillow, Bradford H. – Child Development, 2002
Two experiments investigated kindergarten through fourth-graders' and adults' ability to evaluate the certainty of deductive inferences, inductive inferences, and guesses, and explain the origins of inferential knowledge. Findings indicated that children rated their own deductions as more certain than guesses, but when judging another person's…
Descriptors: Adults, Age Differences, Cognitive Development, Cognitive Processes
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