Play is an essential component of childhood, but parents and educators sometimes view it as an optional add-on, which gets in the way of learning. This view persists in spite of evidence that play is helpful and sometimes critical to learning in multiple domains, perhaps because precise mechanisms whereby play occasions learning are not well…

While child development is well-recognized as a complex process which could hardly be decomposed into separate lines or domains in contemporary psychological theories, the decomposition approach is widely used in empirical studies. Based on the cultural-historical theory, this study argues for adopting the unit of analysis as a way to bridge this…

Children learn words in a social environment, facilitated in part by social cues from caregivers, such as eye-gaze and gesture. A common assumption is that social cues convey either perceptual or social information, depending on the age of the child. In this review of research on word learning and social cues during early childhood, we propose…

How do young children decide which events can happen within fictional stories (extension) and learn new information from these stories (export)? In two studies, we investigate these two issues as well as the influence of story genre (realistic or fantastical) on these processes. Preschoolers (N = 192) heard either a realistic or fantastical story…

Accurately remembering how and when one's own learning occurs is an important metacognitive skill that matures during the early school years. In two studies, the impact of a delay on this ability was examined. In Study 1, 30 children in two age groups (4-year-olds and 5-year-olds) participated in two-staged learning events and were interviewed…

The impact of differences in level of baseline responding on contingency learning in the first year was examined by considering the response acquisition of infants classified into baseline response quartiles. Whereas the three lower baseline groups showed the predicted increment in responding to a contingency, the highest baseline responders did…

The current study examined if preschoolers' understanding of fantasy and reality are related to their learning from educational videos. Forty-nine 3- to 6-year-old children watched short clips of popular educational programs in which animated characters solved problems. Following video viewing, children attempted to solve real-world problems…

This study sought to clarify the process of knowledge acquisition by examining why people tend to misattribute others' activities as their own after having interacted with them. In Study 1, an experiment was conducted with 4-year-old children allocated to 2 groups: one group of children interacted with an adult, and the other group interacted with…

Learning is defined as a change in behaviour that occurs as a result of experience. It is clear that the fetus can learn by means of habituation, classical conditioning and exposure learning. These types of learning will be discussed in relation to learning in the womb and the memory of learned material after birth. Furthermore, the potential…

Three-month-old Cameroonian Nso farmer and German middle-class infants were compared regarding learning and retention in a computerized mobile task. Infants achieving a preset learning criterion during reinforcement were tested for immediate and long-term retention measured in terms of an increased response rate after reinforcement and after a…