Children rely on their Approximate Number System to intuitively perceive number. Such adaptations often exhibit sensitivity to real-world statistics. This study investigates a potential manifestation of the ANS's sensitivity to real-world statistics: a negative power-law distribution of objects in natural scenes should be reflected in children's…

How do children reason about academic performance across development? A classic view suggests children's intuitive theories in this domain undergo qualitative changes. According to this view, older children and adults consider both effort and skill as sources of performance (i.e., a "performance = effort + skill" theory), but younger…

Effective category-based induction requires understanding that categories include both fundamental similarities between members and important variation. This article explores 4- to 11-year-olds' (n = 207) and adults' (n = 49) intuitions about this balance between within-category homogeneity and variability using a novel induction task in which…

The present studies investigated children's and adults' intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about 2 different ways of determining an unknown object's category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence)…