In pursuing goals, people seek favorable odds. We investigated whether young children use this fact to infer goals from people's actions across two experiments on Canadian 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 316; 167 girls, 149 boys). Participants' demographic information was not formally collected, but the region is predominantly middle-class and…

Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use…

Despite numerous efforts to attenuate the Black-White discipline gap in U.S. schools, Black students are still suspended for minor infractions at a disproportionately higher rate than their White peers. Using a racially diverse sample (n = 1,515; M[subscript age] = 12.7; 50% boys; 72% Black, 28% White), this 3-year longitudinal study examined…

We tested 6- and 8-month-old White and non-White infants (N = 53 total, 28 girls) from Northern California in a visual search task to determine whether a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous display (a singleton) attracts attention because it is a unique singleton and "pops out" in a categorical manner, or whether attention instead…

Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5-7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about…

Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative…

Ageism is the most prevalent form of prejudice and is experienced by both older and younger people. Little is known about whether these experiences are interdependent or have common origins. We analyze data from 8,117 older (aged 70 and over) and 11,647 younger respondents (15-29 years) in representative samples from 29 countries in the European…

Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes termed bias to trust in testimony, has primarily been studied in children preschool-age and younger, presumably…

The present study investigated the development of fraction comparison strategies through a longitudinal analysis of children's responses to a fraction comparison task in 4th through 6th grades (N = 394). Participants were asked to choose the larger value for 24 fraction pairs blocked by fraction type. Latent class analysis of performance over item…