Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.S. 4- and 5-year-olds in…

Three studies explored the abilities of 205 children (5-11 years) and 74 adults (18-72 years) to distinguish directly versus indirectly acquired information in a scenario where an individual grew up in isolation from human culture. Directly acquired information is knowledge acquired through firsthand experience. Indirectly acquired information is…

Reports two experiments conducted in an attempt to extend findings by Ellis which suggest a rehearsal deficit in mentally retarded adults. (Author/SDH)

Used physical systems with effects of continuous magnitude to examine development of causal prediction in 30 children of 5 and 9 years and adults. There were clear age differences in the ability to integrate information about potency and resistance into sophisticated causal predictions of the magnitude of an effect. (RJC)

Three experiments examined the modes of processing that children and adults use in learning family-resemblance categories. Children and adults exhibited primarily analytic, rather than holistic, modes of learning. (PCB)

In French, the transcription of the same sound can be guided by both probabilistic graphotactic constraints (e.g., t is more often transcribed ette after -v than after -f) and morphological constraints (e.g., t is always transcribed ette when used as a diminutive suffix). Three experiments showed that pseudo-word spellings of 8-to 11-year-old…

Two experiments investigated kindergarten through fourth-graders' and adults' ability to evaluate the certainty of deductive inferences, inductive inferences, and guesses, and explain the origins of inferential knowledge. Findings indicated that children rated their own deductions as more certain than guesses, but when judging another person's…