In the present study, we examined the development of episodic memory and episodic foresight. Three- and 5-year-olds were interviewed individually using a personalised timeline that included photographs of them at different points in their life. After constructing the timeline with the experimenter, each child was asked to discuss a number of…

Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

In three studies, 5-10-year-old children and an adult comparison group judged another's certainty in making inductive inferences and guesses. Participants observed a puppet make strong inductions, weak inductions, and guesses. Participants either had no information about the correctness of the puppet's conclusion, knew that the puppet was correct,…

Four studies examined the role of generic language in facilitating 4- and 5-year-old children's ability to cross-classify. Participants were asked to classify an item into a familiar (taxonomic or script) category, then cross-classify it into a novel (script or taxonomic) category with the help of a clue expressed in either generic or specific…

Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas…

We evaluate the hypothesis that children's diagnostic causal reasoning becomes more sophisticated as their understanding of uncertainty advances. When the causal status of candidate causes was known, 3- and 4-year-olds were capable of diagnostic inference (Experiment 1) and could revise their beliefs when told their initial diagnosis was incorrect…

In adults, the ability to apply semantic grouping strategies has been found to depend on working memory. To investigate this relation in children, two sort-recall tasks (one without and one with a grouping instruction) were administered to 6-12-year-olds. The role of working memory was examined by means of mediation analyses and by assessing…

Spatial scaling is an integral aspect of many spatial tasks that involve symbol-to-referent correspondences (e.g., map reading, drawing). In this study, we asked 3-6-year-olds and adults to locate objects in a two-dimensional spatial layout using information from a second spatial representation (map). We examined how scaling factor and reference…

The goal of this study was to investigate children's descriptions and evaluations of their reasons for leaving others out of a peer group. A total of 84 children (divided into 7-, 11-, and 17-year-old age groups) provided a narrative account of a time they excluded a peer and were subsequently asked to evaluate their reasons for exclusion. With…

This study explored factors underlying preschoolers' ability to make future-oriented choices. In a delay-of-gratification choice task, quantity and visibility of the reward was systematically varied. Participants included 90 typically developing children aged 2-4 years. Children made more choices to delay gratification as the quantity of the…

This study investigates the relationship between mental-state language and theory of mind in primary school children. The participants were 110 primary school students (mean age = 9 years and 7 months; SD = 12.7 months). They were evenly divided by gender and belonged to two age groups (8- and 10-year-olds). Linguistic, metacognitive and cognitive…

The current study examined the role of executive functioning (EF) in children's prospective memory (PM) by assessing the effect of delay and number of intentions to-be-remembered on PM, as well as relations between PM and EF. Ninety-six 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds completed a PM task and two executive function tasks. The PM task required children to…

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the…

We compared the performance of twenty 5-7-year-olds on two spatial-temporal judgment tasks. In a semantic task, children located temporal distances from today that were described using conventional, temporal terms on a spatial timeline. In an autobiographical task, children judged temporal distances on the same spatial timeline for events that…

Three experiments examined 3- and 5-year-olds' recognition of faces in constant and varied emotional expressions. Children were asked to identify repeatedly presented target faces, distinguishing them from distractor faces, during an immediate recognition test and during delayed assessments after 10 min and one week. Emotional facial expression…