In many decision situations, individuals must actively search information before they can make a satisfying choice. In such instances, individuals must be aware of the fact that not all information may be equally relevant for the choice at hand--thus, individuals should weight information by its respective relevance. We compared children's and…

Numerical comparison is a primary measure of the acuity of children's approximate number system. Approximate number system acuity is associated with key developmental outcomes such as symbolic number skill, standardized test scores, and even employment outcomes (Halberda, Mazzocco, & Feigenson, 2008; Parsons & Bynner, 1997). We examined…

Young children are remarkably flexible reasoners insofar as they modify their inferences to accommodate the conceptual information or perceptual relations represented in an inductive problem. Children's inductive reasoning is highly sensitive to what evidence is presented to them. Four experiments with 115 preschoolers (M[subscript age] = 4;8) and…

This study examined whether children 4- and 5-years-old (N = 156) can revise a physical science misconception from different types of picture books. A realistic fiction book and informational book with identical images matched in word count and reading difficulty level were compared to a control book about plants. In the pretest and posttest,…

Much research has investigated how children relate to norms taught to them by adult authorities. Very few studies have investigated norms that arise out of children's own peer interactions. In two studies, we investigated how 5- and 7-year-old children teach, enforce, and understand rules that they either created themselves or were taught by an…

Cross-race friendships can promote the development of positive racial attitudes, yet they are relatively uncommon and decline with age. In an effort to further our understanding of the extent to which children expect cross-race friendships to occur, we examined 4- to 6-year-olds' (and adults') use of race when predicting other children's…

Three studies investigated the effects of pedagogical cues to an artist's referential intention on 2- and 2.5-year-old children's understanding of drawings in a matching task without verbal labels support. Results showed that pedagogical cues, the combination of the artist's eye gaze while she was creating the drawings (nonlinguistic cues), and…

How do toddlers learn the names of geometric forms? Previous work suggests that preschoolers have fragmentary knowledge and that defining properties are not understood until well into elementary school. The current study investigated when children first begin to understand shape names and how they apply those labels to unusual instances. We tested…

In human children and adults, familiar face types--typically own-age and own-species faces--are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual…

The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

The ability to track moving objects is a crucial skill for performance in everyday spatial tasks. The tracking mechanism depends on representation of moving items as coherent entities, which follow the spatiotemporal constraints of objects in the world. In the present experiment, participants tracked 1 to 4 targets in a display of 8 identical…

Children are able to distinguish between regular events that can occur in everyday reality and magical events that are ordinarily impossible. How do children respond to a person who brings about magical as compared with ordinary outcomes? In two studies, we tested children's acceptance of informants' claims when the informants had produced either…

The study of anthropomorphism in adults has received considerable interest with the development of the Individual Differences in Anthropomorphism Questionnaire (IDAQ; Waytz, Cacioppo, & Epley, 2010). Anthropomorphism in children--its development, correlates, and consequences--is also of significant interest, yet a comparable measure does not…

Previous research has clearly demonstrated that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves deficits in multiple neuropsychological functions, such as executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). A conceptual distinction is commonly made between cool and hot EF. In ASD, continued attention has been paid to the cool areas of executive dysfunction.…

Two studies were conducted to investigate effects of domain knowledge on metacognitive monitoring across the life span in materials of different complexity. Participants from 4 age groups (3rd-grade children, adolescents, younger and older adults) were compared using an expert-novice paradigm. In Study 1, soccer experts' and novices'…