Learning takes time: Performance usually starts poorly and improves with practice. Do children intuit this basic phenomenon of skill learning? In preregistered Experiment 1 (n = 125; 54% female; 48% White; collected 2022-2023), US 7- to 8-year-old children predicted improved performance, 5- to 6-year-old children predicted flat performance, and…

This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One-hundred-nine parent-child dyads (3-6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian-American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported)…

This study investigated whether infants encode better the features of a briefly occluded object if its movements are specified simultaneously by vision and audition than if they are not (data collected: 2017-2019). Experiment 1 showed that 10-month-old infants (N = 39, 22 females, White-English) notice changes in the visual pattern on the object…

Young children often learn less from video than face-to-face presentations. Meta-regression models were used to examine the average size of this difference (video deficit) and investigate moderators. An average deficit of about half of a standard deviation was reported across 122 independent effect sizes from 59 reports, involving children ages…

Do children consider how others learned when seeking help? Across three experiments, German children (N = 536 3-to-8 year olds, 49% female, majority White, tested 2017-2019) preferred to learn from successful active learners selectively by context: They sought help solving a problem from a learner who had independently discovered the solution to a…

An inherent component of tool-use actions is the transformation of the user's operating movement into the desired effect. In this study, the relevance of this transformation for young children's learning of tool-use actions was investigated. Sixty-four children at the age of 27-30 months learned to use levers which either simply extended…

Although many U.S. children can count sets by 4 years, it is not until 5½--6 years that they understand how counting relates to number--that is, that adding 1 to a set necessitates counting up one number. This study examined two knowledge sources that 3½- to 6-year-olds (N = 136) may leverage to acquire this "successor function": (a)…

Research suggests that children can learn new information via pretense. However, a fundamental problem with existing studies is that children are passive receivers of the pretense rather than active, engaged participants. This preregistered study replicates previous learning from pretense findings (Sutherland & Friedman, 2012, "Child…

Food routines are an ecocultural asset of Latino families. This cluster-randomized trial with 248 children (M[subscript age] = 67 months; 50% girls; 13 schools) investigated the impact of a 4-week family program designed to capitalize on food routines in improving Latino kindergarteners' outcomes in the United States. There were moderate-to-large…

Recent studies established that making concurrent judgments of learning (JOLs) can significantly alter (typically enhance) memory itself--a "reactivity" effect. The current study recruited 190 Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 8.68 years; 101 female) in 2020 and 2021 to explore the reactivity effect on children's learning, its…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

One way children are remarkable learners is that they learn from others. Critically, children are selective when assessing from whom to learn, particularly in the domain of word learning. We conducted an analysis of children's selective word learning, reviewing 63 papers on 6,525 participants. Children's ability to engage in selective word…

This study investigated the relation between Dual Language Learners' (N = 90) vocabulary and grammar comprehension and word learning processes in preschool (aged 3-through-5 years). Of interest was whether: (a) performance in Spanish correlated with performance in English within each domain; and (b) comprehension predicted novel word learning…

Little is known about the influence of social context on children's event memory. Across four studies, we examined whether learning that could occur in the absence of a person was more robust when a person was present. Three-year-old children (N = 125) viewed sequential events that either included or excluded an acting agent. In Experiment 1,…

This study examined age-related differences in the effectiveness of two generative learning strategies (GLSs). Twenty-five children aged 9-11 and 25 university students aged 17-29 performed a facts learning task in which they had to generate either a prediction or an example before seeing the correct result. We found a significant Age × Learning…