What is the role of linguistic labels in inductive generalization? According to one approach labels denote categories and differ from object features, whereas according to another approach labels start out as features and may become category markers in the course of development. This issue was addressed in four experiments with 4- and 5-year-olds…

The objective of this study was to describe the developmental progression of counterfactual reasoning from childhood to adulthood. In contrast to the traditional view, it was recently reported by Rafetseder and colleagues that even a majority of 6-year-old children do not engage in counterfactual reasoning when asked counterfactual questions…

Spatial reasoning, a crucial skill for everyday actions, develops gradually during the first several years of childhood. Previous studies have shown that perceptual information and problem solving strategies are critical for successful spatial reasoning in young children. Here, we sought to link these two factors by examining children's use of…

It is widely accepted that adults show an advantage for deontic over epistemic reasoning. Two published studies (Cummins, 1996b; Harris and Nunez, 1996, Experiment 4) found evidence of this "deontic advantage" in preschool-aged children and are frequently cited as evidence that preschoolers show the same deontic advantage as adults. However,…

Adult reasoning has been shown as mediated by the inhibition of intuitive beliefs that are in conflict with logic. The current study introduces a classic procedure from the memory field to investigate belief inhibition in 12- to 17-year-old reasoners. A lexical decision task was used to probe the memory accessibility of beliefs that were cued…

To examine age trends in precedent-setting decisions and the effects of these decisions on perceptions of authorities, preadolescents and adolescents were presented with deontic rule infractions that occurred in the absence or presence of mitigating circumstances. In Study 1, in the absence of mitigating circumstances, adolescents recommended…

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction…

This study addressed preschoolers' cognitive flexibility in an inductive task requiring response feedback processing to infer relevant task goals. A total of 63 4- to 6-year-olds were tested on a perceptual matching task in which they needed to switch attention among three colors. A computational model was designed to track down how responses to…

The aim of the current study was to investigate the performance of 6-, 8-, and 14-year-olds on an analogy-making task involving analogies in which there are competing perceptual and relational matches. We hypothesized that the selection of the common relational structure requires the inhibition of other salient features, in particular, perceptual…

Developmental studies have provided mixed evidence with regard to the question of whether children consider sample size and sample diversity in their inductive generalizations. Results from four experiments with 105 undergraduates, 105 school-age children (M = 7.2 years), and 105 preschoolers (M = 4.9 years) showed that preschoolers made a higher…

When children hear an object referred to with a label that is moderately discrepant from its appearance, they frequently make inferences about that object consistent with the label rather than its appearance. We asked whether 3-year-olds actually believe these unexpected labels (i.e., conversion) or whether their inferences simply reflect a desire…

Recent studies have documented an evolutionarily primitive, early emerging cognitive system for the mental representation of numerical quantity (the analog magnitude system). Studies with nonhuman primates, human infants, and preschoolers have shown this system to support computations of numerical ordering, addition, and subtraction involving…

A cross-cultural comparison between U.S. and Hong Kong preschoolers examined factors responsible for young children's analogical reasoning errors. On a scene analogy task, both groups had adequate prerequisite knowledge of the key relations, were the same age, and showed similar baseline performance, yet Chinese children outperformed U.S. children…

A total of 96 children ages five, six, and seven were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence "stories" told by a puppet and to justify their responses. Stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent and in whether the principle upon which the story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly…

This study of the understanding of the words "and" and "or" in children, ages 2-7 1/2, indicates that "and" is used to express enumeration, and "or" to express alternatives, and that most children's responses are correct at age 4 and beyond. Differences between the linguistic and logical meaning of connection are discussed. (Author/LLK)