Are young children just random explorers who learn serendipitously? Or are even young children guided by uncertainty-directed sampling, seeking to explore in a systematic fashion? We study how children between the ages of 4 and 9 search in an explore-exploit task with spatially correlated rewards, where exhaustive exploration is infeasible and not…

Under what conditions will people generalize and remember observed social information? Preschool- (n = 44) and young school-age (n = 46) children and adults (n = 40) heard short vignettes describing characters' actions and motives on a single occasion. Characters were introduced using either proper names or category labels. Test questions asked…

Subjects of 4, 5, 7, and 20 years of age performed a speeded classification task designed to isolate sources of interference in visual selective attention. While subjects of all ages were unable to avoid processing distractors, older subjects were better able to inhibit distractor processing. (RH)

Conducted a three-year longitudinal analysis of morphological spelling strategies in second through fourth graders. Found that, when children first adopt morphologically determined spelling patterns, they disregard the morphological basis. Generalization progresses from grammatically inappropriate words to the right grammatical category to the…

This research attempted to expand Piaget's study of children's thinking to include the content and the development of their concepts of death and the impact of experience on those concepts. One hundred twenty-two, middle-class, native-born boys and girls, aged three through twelve years were interviewed. Concepts were found to be composed of nine…