One developmental task faced by children is to identify, remember, and learn from epistemic and moral agents around them who are known to be good or virtuous. Here, in 2 studies, we examined U.S children's (N = 138; 55% female, 45% male; predominantly White, middle-class) memory processes for agents varying in moral and epistemic virtue. In Study…

Preschoolers' causal learning from intentional actions--causal interventions--is subject to a self-agency bias. The authors propose that this bias is evidence-based, in other words, that it is responsive to causal uncertainty. In the current studies, two causes (one child controlled, one experimenter controlled) were associated with one or two…

Describes connectionist model showing exclusivity asymmetries when categorizing visual stimuli, similar to pattern shown by infants. Examines asymmetries in terms of an associative learning mechanism, distributed internal representations, and statistics of feature distributions in the stimuli. Details test of model with infants, finding that…

Examines the development of intuitive theories of motion among college students and children between the ages of 4 and 12. School-aged children made more erroneous predictions on the path a ball takes upon exiting a curved tube than preschoolers, kindergarteners, and college students. Results related to the "growth error." (Author/BB)

Presents a study of paired-associative learning involving a total of 80 preschool and second grade children. Four familiarization categories of pretraining were utilized; results are discussed in terms of the effects of pretraining conditions and age on paired-associative learning and their consistency with some developmental hypotheses and phase…

Two experiments used causal models to examine possible relationships among age, learning rates, learning opportunities and forgetting rates. Found that forgetting rates declined markedly between early and late childhood. (ET)