Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…

The ability to consider multiple possibilities forms the basis for a wide variety of human-unique cognitive capacities. When does this skill develop? Previous studies have narrowly focused on children's ability to prepare for incompatible future outcomes. Here, we investigate this capacity in a causal learning context. Adults (N = 109) and 18- to…

Children have a robust social preference for people similar to them, like those who share their language, accent, and race. In the present research, we show that this preference can diminish when children consider who they want to learn about. Across three experiments, 4- to 6-year-olds (total N = 160; 74 female, 86 male, from the Waterloo region…

We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' (N = 194) appreciation of the link between knowledge and ownership. Namely, we asked whether preschoolers appreciate the ways in which owners are typically knowledgeable about artifacts. Experiment 1 revealed that 4- and 5-year-olds view owners as better sources of knowledge about artifacts than those who simply…

Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as 'Some of the animals are safe to pet' can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference 'Some and not all animals are safe to pet' when uttered by an expert. The same…

Piaget's theory of stage structure is synonymous with discussions involving cognitive development. As with any theoretical model, researchers inevitably and rightly seek to affirm and/or contest the elements of the model presented. In this comparative study, students' performance across three hands-on engineering tasks for two distinct student…

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…

The ability to anticipate the future improves significantly across the preschool years. Whereas 5-year-olds understand that they will prefer adult items in the future, 3-year-olds indicate they will continue to prefer child items. We explore these age-related changes in future-oriented cognition by comparing children's inferences about their…

Novel causal systems pose a problem of variable choice: How can a reasoner decide which variable is causally relevant? Which variable in the system should a learner manipulate to try to produce a desired, yet unfamiliar, casual outcome? In much causal reasoning research, participants learn how a particular set of preselected variables produce a…

The purpose of this article is to show how the philosophical theory of inferentialism can be used to understand students' conceptual development in the field of mathematics. Based on the works of philosophers such as Robert Brandom, an epistemological theory in mathematics education is presented that offers the opportunity to trace students'…

Adults automatically infer a person's social disposition and future behavior based on the many properties they observe about how they look and sound. The goal of the current study is to explore the developmental origins of this bias. We tested whether 12-month-old infants automatically infer a character's social disposition (e.g., whether they are…

If a child asks a friend to play football and the friend replies, 'I have a cough', the requesting child must make a 'relevance inference' to determine the communicative intent. Relevance inferencing is a key component of pragmatics, that is, the ability to integrate social context into language interpretation and use. We tested which cognitive…

The research aimed to uncover the effect of JiRQA learning a model of based gender on students' achievement at the environmental pollution material. The method was quasi-experimental using of 2 x 2 factorial. The population was all students at junior high school from Ketungau Tengah, Indonesia. The samples were 120 students from two separate…

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…

Higher-order thinking is relational reasoning in which multiple representations are linked together, through inferences, comparisons, abstractions, and hierarchies. We examine the development of higher-order thinking in 64 preschool-aged children, observed from 14 to 58 months in naturalistic situations at home. We used children's spontaneous talk…