Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children's inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children's ability to reason about the number of candidate causes…

Young children distinguish between the physical and biological domains of knowledge. The current study examines how this distinction is expressed in a story construction task. Three- and 4-year-olds were shown pairs of pictures, one that depicted a normal event and one that depicted an event that violated either physical or biological causal…

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2,…

Two studies examined how 3-6-year-olds understand the process of learning. In study 1 examined how children spontaneously talk about learning via a CHILDES language analysis. Talk about the learning process increased between the ages of 3-5. Talk specifically about learning in terms of desire decreased during this period. This suggests the…