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…

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…

Enhanced perception may allow for visual search superiority by individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but does it occur over time? We tested high-functioning children with ASD, typically developing (TD) children, and TD adults in two tasks at three presentation rates (50, 83.3, and 116.7 ms/item) using rapid serial visual presentation.…

Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important…

Introduction: This paper problematises how children are categorised as a specific user group within information behaviour research and discusses the implications of this categorisation. Methods: Two edited collections of papers on children's information behaviour are analysed. Analysis: The analysis is influenced by previous discourse analytic…

What are the representations and learning mechanisms that underlie conceptual development? The present research provides evidence in favor of the claim that this process is guided by an early-emerging predisposition to think and learn about abstract kinds. Specifically, three studies (N=192) demonstrated that 4- to 7-year-old children have better…

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…

Many theories of human cognition postulate that people are equipped with a repertoire of strategies to solve the tasks they face. This theoretical framework of a cognitive toolbox provides a plausible account of intra- and interindividual differences in human behavior. Unfortunately, it is often unclear how to rigorously test the toolbox…

Executive functions are a set of high cognitive abilities that control and regulate other functions and behaviors and are crucial for successful adaptation. Deficits in executive functions are frequently described in developmental disorders, which are characterized by disadaptive behavior. However, executive functions are not widely examined in…