The goal of this study was to investigate children's descriptions and evaluations of their reasons for leaving others out of a peer group. A total of 84 children (divided into 7-, 11-, and 17-year-old age groups) provided a narrative account of a time they excluded a peer and were subsequently asked to evaluate their reasons for exclusion. With…

Spatial scaling is an integral aspect of many spatial tasks that involve symbol-to-referent correspondences (e.g., map reading, drawing). In this study, we asked 3-6-year-olds and adults to locate objects in a two-dimensional spatial layout using information from a second spatial representation (map). We examined how scaling factor and reference…

Considerable evidence indicates that shape similarity plays a major role in object recognition, identification and categorization. However, little is known about shape processing and its development. Across four experiments, we addressed two related questions. First, what makes objects similar in shape? Second, how does the processing of shape…

Our aim was to investigate why 16-month-old infants fail to master a novel tool-use action via observational learning. We hypothesized that 16-month-olds' difficulties may be due to not understanding the goal of the observed action. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether showing infants an explicit demonstration of the goal of the action…

Numerous studies have established that visual working memory has a limited capacity that increases during childhood. However, debate continues over the source of capacity limits and its developmental increase. Simmering (2008) adapted a computational model of spatial cognitive development, the Dynamic Field Theory, to explain not only the source…

Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

In three studies, 5-10-year-old children and an adult comparison group judged another's certainty in making inductive inferences and guesses. Participants observed a puppet make strong inductions, weak inductions, and guesses. Participants either had no information about the correctness of the puppet's conclusion, knew that the puppet was correct,…

Four studies examined the role of generic language in facilitating 4- and 5-year-old children's ability to cross-classify. Participants were asked to classify an item into a familiar (taxonomic or script) category, then cross-classify it into a novel (script or taxonomic) category with the help of a clue expressed in either generic or specific…

Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas…

We analyze theoretical differences between conceptualist and minimalist approaches to episodic processing in young children. The "episodic-like" minimalism of Clayton and Dickinson (1998) is a species of the latter. We asked whether an "episodic-like" task (structurally similar to ones used by Clayton and Dickinson) in which participants had to…

Two studies were conducted to examine infants' ability to discern intentions from lexical and prosodic cues. Two groups of 14-18-month-olds participated in these studies. In both studies, infants watched an adult perform a sequence of two-step actions on novel toys that produced an end-result. In the first study actions were marked intentionally…

Using a new paradigm for measuring children's saving behaviors involving two marble games differing in desirability, we assessed whether 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds saved marbles for future use, saved increasingly on a second trial, saved increasingly with age, and were sensitive to the relative value of future rewards. We also assessed whether…

We investigated preschoolers' selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending previous research, children also selectively learned other kinds of acts--novel games--from…

The present study focused on children's deductive reasoning when performing the Latin Square Task, an experimental task designed to explore the influence of relational complexity. Building on Birney, Halford, and Andrew's (2006) research, we created a version of the task that minimized nonrelational factors and introduced new categories of items.…

We discuss the limitations of hypothesis testing using (quasi-) experiments in the study of cognitive development and suggest latent variable modeling as a viable alternative to experimentation. Latent variable models allow testing a theory as a whole, incorporating individual differences with respect to developmental processes or abilities in the…