We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

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,…

The issue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) literacy is gaining popularity in the field of education. Most research on AI literacy has focused on primary, secondary, and higher education, and there has been limited examination of AI literacy programs in early childhood education. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an eight-week AI literacy…

Children in the United States live in a highly racialized society and, as a result, acquire an awareness of race at an early age, eventually developing an understanding of racism (Quintana, 2008). Understanding race and racism is especially relevant for Black children, given their marginalized status in the U.S. and the likelihood that they will…

Engineering and technology teachers have advocated using robotics and coding to cultivate students' computational thinking and problem-solving skills at PreK-12 levels. Understanding teachers' perceptions of how preschool children develop strategies and skills for engaging in robotics and coding activities is crucial for promoting the early use of…

Misconceptions about adaptation by natural selection are widespread among adults and likely stem, in part, from cognitive biases and intuitive theories observable in early childhood. Current educational guidelines that recommend delaying comprehensive instruction on the topic of adaptation until adolescence, therefore, raise concerns because…

Young children increasingly interact with technological devices, either as a form of entertainment or for educational purposes. This research sought to investigate the early symbolic understanding of an interactive, three-dimensional digital image presented on a tablet. Two studies were designed in which the children had to use the image as a…

The purpose of this study is to examine who young children (3-7-year-olds) would depend on for asking information, and whose information they would endorse: the one provided precise expressions which were the mathematical presentation of several measurements or the other by a person who provided relative expressions which were assistant's personal…

The aim of the present study was to examine how social evaluation influences creative idea generation, and whether this effect develops with age. To do so, early adolescents, middle adolescents, and late adolescents performed a creative task either alone or under the supervision of an adult examiner. Three major findings emerged: 1) the social…

This research focuses on young children's understandings about economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Participants were 43 children, aged from 3 to 7 years of age, recruited from two kindergartens in Croatia. Children's ideas were discussed through semi-structured interviews that focused on saving, spending, recycling, justice,…

312 Singaporean children aged 4, 7, and 10 years from four different home language backgrounds--English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil--were tested for their recognition of animals and non-animals. The Malay-speaking group of children was the notable group that showed a different developmental pattern from the other three groups. They performed…

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster…

Over the past three decades, our understanding of science learning in early childhood has improved exponentially and today we have a strong empirically based understanding of science experiences for children aged three to six years. However, our understanding of science learning as it occurs for children from birth to three years, is limited. We…

Prior work showed that infants look longer at impossible figures than possible ones, although it is unclear whether they or older children understand "impossibility." We employed a series of matching and sorting tasks with pictures and objects to evaluate children's knowledge of this dimension. In Experiment 1, nearly all children…

Recently, researchers interested in the nature and origins of semantic representations have investigated an especially informative case study: The acquisition of the word "most"--a quantifier which by all accounts demands a sophisticated second-order logic, and which therefore poses an interesting challenge to theories of language…