Sometimes we should persist to succeed. But other times it might be wiser to give up on the task at hand and focus our energy on something new. Knowing whether a task is worth the effort potentially requires multiple capacities, including sensitivity to one's own likelihood to succeed on the current problem, the associated costs with continuing to…

Children and adults appreciate that physical action is typically the conduit between individuals' desires and the fulfillment of those desires. However, certain forms of petitionary thought -- e.g., wishing and praying -- are believed by many people to influence the external world and fulfill desires without direct physical action. We examine…

Recent findings have suggested that adults' and children's approximate number system (ANS) acuity may be malleable through training, but research on ANS acuity has largely been conducted with adults and children who are from middle- to high-income homes. We conducted 2 experiments to test the malleability of ANS acuity in preschool-aged children…

In 2 studies, we attempted to capture the information-processing abilities underlying children's reality-status judgments. Forty 5- to 6-year-olds and 53 7- to 8-year-olds heard about novel entities (animals) that varied in their fit with children's world knowledge. After hearing about each entity, children could either guess reality status…

How likely is the glass to break, given that it is heated? The present study asks questions such as this with or without the premise "if the glass is heated, it breaks." A reduced problem (question without premise) measures the statistical dependency (conditional probability) of an event to occur, given that another has occurred. Such…

Three experiments examined whether preschoolers recognize that the causal properties of objects generalize to new members of the same set given either deterministic or probabilistic data. Experiment 1 found that 3- and 4-year-olds were able to make such a generalization given deterministic data but were at chance when they observed probabilistic…

This study examines the development of children's ability to reason about proportions that involve either discrete entities or continuous amounts. Six-, 8- and 10-year olds were presented with a proportional reasoning task in the context of a game involving probability. Although all age groups failed when proportions involved discrete quantities,…