In 'Against Stored Abstractions,' Ambridge uses neural and computational evidence to make his case against abstract representations. He argues that storing only exemplars is more parsimonious -- why bother with abstraction when exemplar models with on-the-fly calculation can do everything abstracting models can and more -- and implies that his…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

We examined whether inductive reasoning development is better characterized by accounts assuming an early category bias versus an early perceptual bias. We trained 264 children aged 3 to 9 years to categorize novel insects using a rule that directly pitted category membership against appearance. This was followed by an induction task with…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an exploration of parents', teachers' and children's perspectives on children's understanding of wellbeing with the aim of illuminating and comparing the conceptualisation of wellbeing from these three perspectives. Design/methodology/approach: The participatory method developed to undertake the…

Tasks administered to sixty females 60-120 months of age show that it is possible to test for Piagetian logic by using problems structured in a social context and also suggest that the order of acquisition of logical operations with social stimuli is consistent with the order which has been established with the use of physical stimuli. (Author/CS)

Examined the nature of perceptual classification in children and young adults. Found that most children attend selectively to one stimulus dimension when making perceptual classification judgments. Suggests that this developmental trend does not appear to be a holistic-to-analytic shift but rather a trend toward greater consistency in following a…

Two experiments investigated perceptual primacy of dimensional and similarity relations in stimulus classification of mentally retarded children. Results support a distinction between separable and integral stimulus structures, but do not support an integral-to-separable shift in perceptual development. Results suggest implications for…

Studies concerned with the synchronous emergence prediction of Piaget's structures-of-the-whole principle are discussed in conjunction with three groups of concrete-operational skills: (1) transitivity/conservation/class inclusion; (2) double classification/double seriation; and (3) ordinal, cardinal, and natural number concepts. Findings show…