Often, the evidence we observe is consistent with more than one explanation. How do learners discriminate among candidate causes? The current studies examine whether counterfactuals help 5-year olds (N = 120) select between competing hypotheses and compares the effectiveness of these prompts to a related scaffold. In Experiment 1, counterfactuals…

Home math interventions often incorporate informational priming--explicit prompts emphasizing parental math input. While effective in increasing math talk, its impact on child outcome is mixed. This study examined how informational priming shapes the content and dynamic of math interactions. In year 2023, 122 Chinese parent-child dyads…

The study examined how children's self-regulation skills measured by the strengths and weaknesses of ADHD symptoms and normal behavior rating are associated with story comprehension and how verbal engagement and e-book discussion prompts moderate this relation. Children aged 3-7 (N = 111, 50% female, Chinese as first language) read an interactive…

This study explored under what conditions young children would set reminders to aid their memory for delayed intentions. A computerized task requiring participants to carry out delayed intentions under varying levels of cognitive load was presented to 63 children (aged between 6.9 and 13.0 years old). Children of all ages demonstrated…

This study examined the effects of coaching (encouragement and rehearsal of false reports) and truth induction (a child-friendly version of the oath or general reassurance about the consequences of disclosure) on 4- to 7-year-old maltreated children's reports (N = 198). Children were questioned using free recall, repeated yes-no questions, and…

There is ongoing debate about children's ability to use subsequently acquired language to describe preverbal experiences. This issue was addressed experimentally in this investigation using a novel paradigm. Two-year-old children who lacked color words were individually taught to activate a bubble machine by selecting a particular color of bubble…

Infants were trained to kick their feet into a crib mobile and tested two weeks later. Found that presentation of a moving, but not a stationary, mobile in a reminder treatment 24 hours before testing alleviated forgetting in the test and that, in the test, memory of the kicking activity was specific to the conditions of the original training. (BC)

Factors that influence the incidence of utilization deficiencies and other recall/strategy-use patterns on a strategic memory task were evaluated in two hundred and fourteen 7- and 9-year-old children. Both utilization deficiencies and the incidence of children showing increases in both recall and strategy use over phases were more likely to be…

One hundred 18-month-olds were tested using sequential touching and following 4 different priming contexts using sets of toys that could be simultaneously categorized at either the basic or global level. An exact expression of the expected mean sequence length for arbitrary categories was derived as a function of the number of touches made, and a…

Three formal operations tasks were presented to children of ages 10, 13, and 17. None of the youngest subjects and only half of the older subjects solved the first task without prompts. A few of the younger subjects and nearly all of the adolescents, however, solved the third task without prompts. (Author/JMB)

Children 3 1/2 and 5 years of age were tested for their intuitive knowledge of the psychological fact that one mental event may trigger or cue another related mental event. (JMB)

Results confirm an earlier finding that experimentally induced rehearsal facilitates recall. (Authors/CS)

Children of 8 and 11 years and college students were tested for reorientation of visual attention to a target following a cue. The first, but not the second, experiment showed an interaction between distance of target from fixation and stimulus onset asynchrony. The second experiment suggested children can orient attention through valid, neutral,…

Adult assistance procedures were experimentally compared for their effects upon the preschool child's tendency to persist in self-selected manipulative tasks in a free-play setting. (JMB)

Two experiments compared the abilities of third and sixth graders and adults to recognize sarcasm given context and intonation cues. Children recognized sarcasm only when given a speaker's sarcastic intonation cue, even when context strongly indicated a nonliteral interpretation. (BC)