This study provides an experimental test of the hypothesis that level of gender constancy understanding affects children's sex typing. Preschool-age children (N = 62, mean age = 47 months) were randomly assigned to experimental lessons that taught that biological traits (including gender) are either fixed (pro-constancy condition) or mutable…

Two tasks were administered to 40 children aged from 16 to 20 months (mean age = 18;1), to evaluate children's understanding of declarative and informative intention [Behne, T., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2005). One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions behind gestures in a hiding game. "Developmental Science", 8, 492-499;…

Shown commensurate actions and information by an adult, preschoolers' causal learning was influenced by the pedagogical context in which these actions occurred. Four-year-olds who were provided with a reason for an experimenter's action relevant to learning causal structure showed more accurate causal learning than children exposed to the same…

The present study investigated the role of the causal status of features and feature type in biological categorizations by young children. Study 1 showed that 5-year-olds are more strongly influenced by causal features than effect features; 4-year-olds exhibit no such tendency. There therefore appears to be a conceptual change between the ages of…

This study involved four age groups: 13-15-, 23-25-, 33-35-, and 43-45-yr-olds. All adult groups involved persons with university education and persons with low education. Participants (1) solved tasks addressed to spatial, propositional, and social reasoning, (2) evaluated their own performance and the difficulty of the tasks, and (3) answered an…

In an accompanying study, Alibali et al. [Alibali, M. W., Ockuly, K. M., Fischer, A. D. (2009) "Learning new problem-solving strategies leads to changes in problem representation." "Cognitive Development, 24," 89-101.] present an important experimental result: introducing a new strategy can affect conceptual aspects of children's problem…

A previous study with adults [Koriat, A. (2008a). "Easy comes, easy goes? The link between learning and remembering and its exploitation in metacognition." "Memory & Cognition," 36, 416-428] established a correlation between learning and remembering: items requiring more trials to acquisition (TTA) were less likely to be recalled than those…

Can 6- and 8-year-olds (and adults) comprehend common instrument verbs when extended to novel situations? Participants heard eight unusual extensions of common verbs and were asked to paraphrase the verbs' meanings. Half of the verbs used were "specified instrument" verbs that include the name of the instrument used to perform the action (e.g., a…

Proper Names appear at the heart of several debates in philosophy and the cognitive sciences. These include "reference", "intentionality", and the nature of "belief" as well as "language acquisition", "cognitive development", and "memory". This dissertation follows a cognitive approach to the philosophical problems posed by proper names. It puts…

This paper reviews the recent literature on the production of skills of young persons. The literature features the multiplicity of skills that explain success in a variety of life outcomes. Noncognitive skills play a fundamental role in successful lives. The dynamics of skill formation reveal the interplay of cognitive and noncognitive skills, and…

The author's doctoral work involved relating abilities in play to the results of a developmental assessment. She found them to be highly correlated, which should have made her happy. Instead she was troubled by the results. The skills that children use in play are important. Given materials that appeal to them and that "pull for" the desired skill…

This study examined the development of flexibility and abstraction in preschool children by using a newly designed Pattern Completion Task (PCT) and the Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST). In the PCT, children were presented with an incomplete pattern consisting of different-colored shapes and were asked to select the colored shape that…

Cognitive control, the ability to voluntarily guide our behavior, continues to improve throughout adolescence. Below we review the literature on age-related changes in brain function related to response inhibition and working memory, which support cognitive control. Findings from studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) indicate…

Millions of people currently live at altitudes in excess of 2500 metres, where oxygen supply is limited, but very little is known about the development of brain and behavioural function under such hypoxic conditions. We describe the physiological, cognitive and behavioural profile of a large cohort of infants (6-12 months), children (6-10 years)…

Infants' responses to typical and scrambled human body shapes were assessed in relation to the realism of the human body stimuli presented. In four separate experiments, infants were familiarized to typical human bodies and then shown a series of scrambled human bodies on the test. Looking behaviour was assessed in response to a range of different…