When faced with entities with potentially ambiguous category membership, adult category judgments are strongly biased toward dangerous and distinctive properties. For example, a cyanide-water mixture is categorized as cyanide. We used a developmental approach to better understand this cross-domain effect, which we term the asymmetric…

Previous research has shown that when learning categories, adults and young children allocate attention differently. Adults tend to attend selectively, focusing primarily on the most relevant information, whereas young children tend to distribute their attention broadly. Although selective attention is useful in many situations, it also has costs.…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

This study aimed to replicate and extend findings from the only known study that has conducted latent profile analysis of developmental profiles, measured by the Battelle Developmental Inventory, for children in Early Intervention (EI). Children (N = 57,966) who were enrolled in Massachusetts EI sites between 2011 and 2019 and completed a Battelle…

Institutions make new forms of acting possible: Signing executive orders, scoring goals, and officiating weddings are only possible because of the U.S. government, the rules of soccer, and the institution of marriage. Thus, when an individual occupies a particular social role (president, soccer player, and officiator), they acquire new ways of…

Representations of social categories help us make sense of the social world, supporting predictions and explanations about groups and individuals. In an experiment with 156 participants, we explore whether children and adults are able to understand category-property associations (such as the association between "girls" and "liking…

How do people learn categories and what changes with development? The current study attempts to address these questions by focusing on the role of attention in the development of categorization. In Experiment 1, participants (adults, 7-year-olds, and 4-year-olds) were trained with novel categories consisting of deterministic and probabilistic…

Organized semantic representations encoding across- and within-domain distinctions are a hallmark of mature cognition, and understanding how they change with experience and learning is a key endeavor in developmental science. Existing computational modeling studies provide a mechanistic framework for understanding how structured semantic…

Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex. In the current study,…

The acquisition of complex motor, cognitive, and social skills, like playing a musical instrument or mastering sports or a language, is generally associated with implicit skill learning (SL). Although it is a general view that SL is most effective in childhood, and such skills are best acquired if learning starts early, this idea has rarely been…

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…

Although taxonomic proficiency is a prerequisite for understanding ideas central to biology, previous research has established that learners frequently misclassify animals by not following the tenets of accepted taxonomic rubrics. This has immediate relevance with the recently revised English National Curriculum now requiring concepts of animal…

Computational models are tools for testing mechanistic theories of learning and development. Formal models allow us to instantiate theories of cognitive development in computer simulations. Model behavior can then be compared to real performance. Connectionist models, loosely based on neural information processing, have been successful in…

The study provides evidence concerning elementary school children's ability to conduct a scientific investigation. Two hundred and fifty sixth-grade students and 248 fourth-grade students were administered a test, and based on their performance, they were classified into high-ability and low-ability students. The sample of this study was…

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar…