The lack of research exploring the influence of dynamic visual narratives on inference skills prompted the present study with an aim to profile the inference skills in school children between the ages of 6 years and 9 years 11 months using dynamic visual narratives. A total of 80 participants were considered for the study. An animated story was…

During communication, conversational partners should offer as much information as is required and relevant. For instance, the statement "Some Xs Y" is infelicitous if one knows that all Xs Y. Do children understand the link between speaker knowledge and utterance strength? In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N = 32) but not 4-year-olds…

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…

Across 3 experiments, we found evidence that information about who owns an artifact influenced 5- to 10-year-old children's and adults' judgments about that artifact's primary function. Children's and adults' use of ownership information was underpinned by their inference that owners are typically familiar with owned artifacts and are therefore…

Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based…

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,…

Category-based induction requires selective use of different relations to guide inferences; this article examines the development of inferences based on ecological relations among living things. Three hundred and forty-six 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children from rural, suburban, and urban communities projected novel "diseases" or "insides" from one…

Human social interaction depends on individuals identifying the common ground they have with others, based both on personally shared experiences and on cultural common ground that all members of the group share. We introduced 3- and 5-year-old children to a culturally well-known object and a novel object. An experimenter then entered and asked,…

Theory of mind (ToM) refers to humans' ability to recognize the existence of mental states, such as beliefs, emotions, and desires. The literature on ToM in aging and on the relationship between ToM and other cognitive functions, like executive functions, is not homogenous. The aim of the present study was to explore the course of ToM and to…

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

Two-year-old children's reasoning about the relation between their own and others' preferences was investigated across two studies. In Experiment 1, children first observed 2 actors display their individual preferences for various toys. Children were then asked to make inferences about new, visually inaccessible toys and books that were described…

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required…

Reorientation tasks, in which disoriented participants attempt to relocate objects using different visual cues, have previously been understood to depend on representing aspects of the global organisation of the space, for example its major axis for judgements based on geometry. Careful analysis of the visual information available for these tasks…

Children's worlds are increasingly populated by intelligent technologies. This has raised a number of questions about the ways in which technology can change children's ideas about important concepts, like what it means to be alive or smart. In this study, we examined the impact of experience with intelligent technologies on children's ideas about…

Examined reasoning about physics principles within and across ontological kinds among 5- and 7-year-olds and adults. Found that all age groups tended to appropriately generalize what they learned across ontological kinds. Children assumed that principles learned with reference to one ontological kind were more likely to apply within that kind than…