During exploration, young children often show an intuitive sensitivity to uncertainty, despite their strong tendency towards overconfidence in their explicit judgments. Here, we examine the development of children's explicit and implicit recognition of uncertainty using the same stimuli. We presented 4- and 5-year-olds with objects that varied in…

To learn a language infants must learn to link arbitrary sounds to their meaning. While words are the clearest example of this link, they are not the only component of language; morphological regularities (e.g., the plural -s suffix in English) carry meaning as well. Comprehensive theories of language acquisition must account for how infants build…

The learning of the relations between discriminative stimuli, choice actions, and their outcomes can be characterized as conditional discriminative choice learning. Research shows that the technique of presenting unique outcomes for specific cued choices leads to faster and more accurate learning of such relations and has great potential to be…

A longstanding and fundamental debate in developmental science is whether knowledge is acquired through domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To date, there exists no tool to determine whether experimental data support one theoretical approach or the other. In this article, we argue that the U- and N-shaped curves found in a number of…

Behavioral studies show that infants are capable of discriminating the number of objects or events in their environment, while also suggesting that number discrimination in infancy may be ratio-dependent. However, due to limitations of the dependent measures used with infant behavioral studies, the evidence for ratio dependence falls short of the…

Time perception is important for many aspects of human behavior, and a large literature documents that adults represent intervals and that their ability to discriminate temporal intervals is ratio dependent. Here we replicate a recent study by vanMarle and Wynn (2006 ) that used the visual habituation paradigm and demonstrated that temporal…

Behavioral, neuropsychological, and brain imaging research points to a dedicated system for processing number that is shared across development and across species. This foundational Approximate Number System (ANS) operates over multiple modalities, forming representations of the number of objects, sounds, or events in a scene. This system is…

Competing explanations of the beneficial effect of spacing in retardate discrimination learning were tested. Results are inconsistent with consolidation and rehearsal theories but support the prediction of the Geber, Greenfield, and House spacing model that forgetting from short-term memory facilities retardate learning. (Author/SB)

Experiment 1 examined the relationship between dimensional preference and proportion of optional reversal shifts among adults. Experiment 2 examined dimensional preference and shift behaviors using an intradimensional-extradimensional shift paradigm. The results indicate that adults show the same type of behavior previously throught to…

Investigated the possibility that evidence of frequency discrimination might be found when the experimental procedures involved the conjugate reinforcement of nonnutritive sucking. (SDH)

Two experiments are reported that reveal the sources of the developmental difference reported by Crane and Ross that second graders learned more than sixth graders about attributes made relevant after solution of a discrimination task. Experiments use technique whereby children verbalize their hypotheses during solution of a discrimination…

The hypothesis testing abilities of 15 language impaired and 15 normally developing children matched for mental age were investigated using discrimination-learning tasks. Findings indicated the impaired children performed poorer than non-impaired children especially on the nonexplicit problems suggesting the deficits may be related to difficulties…

Four hundred children ages 5, 9, and 12 were given a component selection task with stimuli differing in color and shape. Results indicate a greater tendency for older than younger children to withdraw attention from a normally dominant component when advantageous to adopt another feature as the primary functional cue. (Author/SB)

The results showed that the performance of the autistic children was better than the other two groups on concrete discrimination tasks, was poorer than the other two groups on formal discrimination tasks, and the quality of the autistic children's performance decreased as task requirements for formal discrimination increased. (Author/SB)