Evaluating evidence and restructuring beliefs based on anomalous evidence are fundamental aspects of scientific reasoning. These skills can be challenging for both children and adults, especially in domains where they possess inaccurate prior beliefs that can interfere with the acquisition of correct scientific information (e.g., heavier objects…

Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a…

In Study 1, 103 children ages 4 through 10 answered questions about their concept of and belief in luck, and completed a story task assessing their use of luck as an explanation for events. The interview captured a curvilinear trajectory of children's belief in luck from tentative belief at age 4 to full belief at age 6, weakening belief at age 8,…

In this article, we integrate two constructionist approaches--the theory of constructed emotion and rational constructivism--to introduce several novel hypotheses for understanding emotional development. We first discuss the hypothesis that emotion categories are abstract and conceptual, whose instances share a goal-based function in a particular…

Individuals in many cultures believe in omniscient (all-knowing) beings, but everyday representations of omniscience have rarely been studied. To understand the nature of such representations requires knowing how they develop. Two studies examined the breadth of knowledge (i.e., types of knowledge) and depth of knowledge (i.e., amount of knowledge…

Executive functions and social cognition develop through childhood into adolescence and early adulthood and are important for adaptive goal-oriented behavior (Apperly, Samson, & Humphreys, 2009; Blakemore & Choudhury, 2006). These functions are attributed to frontal networks known to undergo protracted maturation into early adulthood…

Items commonly belong to many categories. Cross-classification is the classification of a single item into more than one category. This research explored 2- to 6-year-old children's use of 2 different category systems for cross-classification: script (e.g., school-time items, birthday party items) and taxonomic (e.g., animals, clothes). The…

Two studies examined infants' understanding of spatial relations during the period following attainment of active search for hidden objects. (Author/SB)

Purpose of study was to investigate the applicability of Piaget's theory and methods to the study of conservation in nonhumans. Two out of four subject monkeys achieved stringent and statistically significant performance criteria in sameness-difference judgment tests and showed significant generalization in the fewest possible trials. (Author/SB)

Children can recognize patterns much earlier than they can reconstruct them. A child cannot understand seriation in an operational sense unless he recognizes a seriated configuration. (ST)

This study attempted to determine whether a shift from complementary to similarity concepts occurred in preschool children prior to the shift from concrete-similarity to abstract-similarity concepts and had been observed among elementary school children. (Author/SB)

Recently, "Developmental Psychology" published 2 articles on the shape bias; both rejected the authors' previous proposals about the role of attentional learning in the development of a shape bias in object name learning. A. Cimpian and E. Markman (2005; see record EJ733667) did so by arguing that the shape bias does not exist but is an…

Examined whether representational changes in digit memory are functions of children's expertise in mental abacus operation when abacus operators reproduced series of digits forward or backward. Found skilled operators equally facile with forward and backward reproduction, but novices slower going backward. Suggests advanced operators apply their…

Empirically describes the relative development of perceptual and conceptual understanding of left-right, back-front, up-down projective relationships between objects and provides a heuristic model of the cognitive processes involved in coordination of perspectives tasks. (Author/ED)

Tested the effectiveness of a 120-problem learning set for teaching simple classification skills to blind children, as compared to a general enrichment program administered to a matched control group. The learning set facilitated mastery of classification, indicating that this training can accelerate the acquisition of Piagetian concepts in…