In two studies, we investigated preschoolers' ability to use others' preferences to learn names for things. Two studies demonstrated that preschool children make smart use of others' preferences. In the first study, preschool children only used information about others' preferences when they were clearly linked to referential intentions. The…

Third, fifth, and seventh graders selected the best strategy (rounding up or rounding down) for estimating answers to two-digit addition problems. Executive function measures were collected for each individual. Data showed that (a) children's skill at both strategy selection and execution improved with age and (b) increased efficiency in executive…

In an accompanying study, Alibali et al. [Alibali, M. W., Ockuly, K. M., Fischer, A. D. (2009) "Learning new problem-solving strategies leads to changes in problem representation." "Cognitive Development, 24," 89-101.] present an important experimental result: introducing a new strategy can affect conceptual aspects of children's problem…

Children sometimes solve problems incorrectly because they fail to represent key features of the problems. One potential source of improvements in children's problem representations is learning new problem-solving strategies. Ninety-one 3rd- and 4th-grade students solved mathematical equivalence problems (e.g., 3+4+6=3+__) and completed a…

Presents a computational framework for modeling cognitive development that provides a language paradigm with which to compare and contrast different facets of children's knowledge. Describes the generative connectionist algorithm "cascade-correlation," the successful use of the algorithm to model cognitive development in various…