It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers' beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3- to 5-year-olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters'…

Three studies explored the abilities of 205 children (5-11 years) and 74 adults (18-72 years) to distinguish directly versus indirectly acquired information in a scenario where an individual grew up in isolation from human culture. Directly acquired information is knowledge acquired through firsthand experience. Indirectly acquired information is…

Used physical systems with effects of continuous magnitude to examine development of causal prediction in 30 children of 5 and 9 years and adults. There were clear age differences in the ability to integrate information about potency and resistance into sophisticated causal predictions of the magnitude of an effect. (RJC)

Expectations concerning form and color in object label referencing of 80 children of 2-3 years were examined in 2 studies. Findings show that children as young as 2 expect form similarity to be a better guide than color similarity to the extension of object labels. (RJC)

Four experiments confirmed the widely accepted hypothesis that, although children as young as two engage in pretend play, even four and five year olds do not understand that pretending requires mental representation. Children appear to misconstrue pretense as its common external manifestations, such as actions, until at least age six. (MDM)

Examined memory functions in individuals with and without autism. Found that the group with autism performed significantly worse than the nonautistic group on temporal order memory, source memory, supraspan free recall, working memory and executive function but not on short- and long-term recognition, cued recall, or new learning ability. (MOK)

Two studies examined the relation between current developmental levels, as estimated by IQ, and proximal levels of development, as estimated by the efficiency of learning and transfer in assisted contexts. Subjects were 8- to ll-year-old children. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. (HOD)

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…