The ability to predict upcoming events is essential in infancy because it enables babies to process information optimally and have successful goal-directed interactions with their environment. In this article, we examine how infants generate predictions in perception, cognition, and action, and address whether and how their predictions are…

This paper reports on a study concerning the social nature of young students' informal inferential reasoning. Employing inferentialism as a background theory, we examine cognitive and sociocultural aspects of reasoning that arose during group discussions as well as trace relations between those aspects. Following a design experiment approach, we…

Descriptions of durational relations can be ambiguous, for example, the description "one meeting happened during another" could mean that one meeting started before the other ended, or it could mean that the meetings started and ended simultaneously. A recent theory posits that people mentally simulate descriptions of durational events…

Discovering the meaning of novel communicative cues is challenging and amounts to navigating an unbounded hypothesis space. Several theories posit that this problem can be simplified by relying on positive expectations about the cognitive utility of communicated information. These theories imply that learners should assume that novel communicative…

In describing how people generalize from observed samples of data to novel cases, theories of inductive inference have emphasized the learner's reliance on the contents of the sample. More recently, a growing body of literature suggests that different assumptions about how a data sample was generated can lead the learner to draw qualitatively…

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…

When a situation could lead to multiple mutually exclusive consequences, recent research shows that people automatically generate multiple predictive inferences in memory. Several theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to account for the generation of predictive inferences. One hypothesis is that inferences are minimally encoded, represented…

Inference-making is a central element of successful reading comprehension, yet provides a challenge for beginning readers. Text decoding takes up cognitive resources which prevents beginning readers from successful inference-making and compromises reading comprehension. Listening does not require any decoding and could therefore offer a less…

This paper reports the statistical and probabilistic reasoning of young children in terms of randomness, variability, and data representations in the context of informal inferential reasoning (IIR). Using the IIR approach, a task was designed and conducted one-on-one with 28 children aged 5 to 6 years old, in a case study setting. The researcher…

Research suggests exposure to misinformation continues to impact belief and reasoning, even if that misinformation has been corrected (referred to as the Continued Influence Effect, CIE). The present experiment explores two potentially important factors that may impact the effect: (1) learner age; and (2) length of delay between retraction and…

The purpose of this study was to examine clusters of less-skilled college readers. College students with below average reading comprehension skills (N = 77) read and thought aloud about four texts, recalled the texts, and completed standardized assessments of reading skills. Based on the findings of cluster analyses of the cognitive processes…

Scalar inference, the process by which we infer meanings stronger than what was explicitly said, has long been a central topic of investigation in theoretical semantics-pragmatics, as well as in psycholinguistics. Upon encountering the sentence "Mary ate some of the deep dish", for instance, hearers regularly compute the pragmatic…

The purpose of this study was to examine clusters of less-skilled college readers. College students with below average reading comprehension skills (N = 77) read and thought aloud about four texts, recalled the texts, and completed standardized assessments of reading skills. Based on the findings of cluster analyses of the cognitive processes…

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…

In learning about the world children must not only make inferences based on minimal evidence, but must deal with conflicting evidence and question those initial inferences when they appear to be wrong. Four experiments (N = 144) found that young children were significantly more likely to revise their initial inferences when conflicting evidence…