How can education optimize transmission of knowledge while also fostering further learning? Focusing on children at the cusp of formal schooling (N = 180, age = 4.0-6.0 y), we investigate learning after direct instruction by a knowledgeable teacher, after questioning by a knowledgeable teacher, and after questioning by a naïve informant.…

Multisensory tools are commonly employed within educational settings (e.g. Carter & Stephenson, 2012), and there is a growing body of literature advocating the benefits of presenting children with multisensory information over unisensory cues for learning (Baker & Jordan, 2015; Jordan & Baker, 2011). This is even the case when the…

Musical instrument training has been linked to improved academic and cognitive abilities in children, but it remains unclear why this occurs. Moreover, access to instrument training is not always feasible, thereby leaving less fortunate children without opportunity to benefit from such training. Although music-based video games may be more…

Response inhibition is crucial for mental and physical health but studies assessing the trainability of this type of inhibition are rare. Thirty-nine children aged 10-12 years and 46 adults aged 18-24 years were assigned to an adaptive go/no-go inhibition training condition or an active control condition. Transfer of training effects to…

Developmental research on selective social learning, or "social learning strategies", is currently a rich source of information about when children copy behaviour, and who they prefer to copy. It also has the potential to tell us when and how human social learning becomes cultural learning; i.e. mediated by psychological mechanisms that…

The theory of natural pedagogy has proposed that infants can use ostensive signals, including eye contact, infant-directed speech, and contingency to learn from others. However, the role of bodily gestures, such as hand-waving, in social learning has been largely ignored. To address this gap in the literature, this study sought to determine…

There is abundant evidence for the "video deficit": children under 2 years old learn better in person than from video. We evaluated whether these findings applied to video chat by testing whether children aged 12-25 months could form relationships with and learn from on-screen partners. We manipulated social contingency: children…

The Approximate Number System (ANS) supports basic arithmetic computation in early childhood, but it is unclear whether the ANS also supports the more complex computations introduced later in formal education. "Solving for x" in addend-unknown problems is notoriously difficult for children, who often struggle with these types of problems…

Two studies compared children's attention to sample composition--whether a sample provides a diverse representation of a category of interest--during teacher-led and learner-driven learning contexts. In Study 1 (n = 48), 5-year-olds attended to sample composition to make inferences about biological properties only when samples were presented by a…

The numerical knowledge of children from low-income backgrounds trails behind that of peers from middle-income backgrounds even before the children enter school. This gap may reflect differing prior experience with informal numerical activities, such as numerical board games. Experiment 1 indicated that the numerical magnitude knowledge of…

To provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three-year-old children showed a strong and significant tendency to…