Recent studies established that making concurrent judgments of learning (JOLs) can significantly alter (typically enhance) memory itself--a "reactivity" effect. The current study recruited 190 Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 8.68 years; 101 female) in 2020 and 2021 to explore the reactivity effect on children's learning, its…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in liking of a conditioned stimulus (CS) consecutive to its repeated pairing with a valent unconditioned stimulus (US). We relied on a multinomial processing tree model to compare the processes underlying EC in middle-aged children (n = 57, M[subscript age] = 8.65, range = 6.94-11.03; 31 females) and…

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent--"truthiness." This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a…

"Place value," which underlies the meanings of multidigits, encompasses the principle of position and base-10 rules. To understand 65, one needs to know that the digits 6 and 5 occupy different positions and thus represent ordered values of different magnitudes (i.e., the "principle of position") and that the value of each…

When presented with a claim that contradicts their intuitions, do children seize opportunities to empirically verify such claims or do they simply acquiesce to what they have been told? To answer this question, we conducted a replication of Ronfard et al. (conducted in the People's Republic of China) in two countries with distinct religious and…

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more…

When learning about the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena such as germs or religious phenomena such as God, children are receptive to the testimony of other people. Research in Western cultures has shown that by 5 to 6 years of age, children--like adults--are confident about the existence of both scientific and religious phenomena. We…

To evaluate the health information literacy (HIL) level and influencing factors among digital immigrants in rural China and to investigate their obstacles of online health information seeking. Cross-sectional study. Digital immigrants aged 45 to 65 in rural China. Self-assessment questionnaires and a semi-structured interview were developed to…

Research has demonstrated that students' learning outcomes and motivation to learn are influenced by the visual design of learning technologies (e.g., learning management systems or LMS). One aspect of LMS design that has not been thoroughly investigated is visual complexity. In two experiments, postsecondary students rated the visual complexity…

Although children often believe an adult's claims, they may have opportunities to check these claims by gathering relevant empirical evidence themselves. Here, we examine whether children seize such opportunities, especially when the claim is counterintuitive. Chinese preschool and elementary schoolchildren were presented with five different-sized…

An important aspect of perspective-taking ability is the appreciation that mental states such as beliefs, desires, and knowledge change over time. The current study focused specifically on 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess--for example, that when they are…

Relations between epistemic perspective and online epistemic processing of evidence when reading a text were examined. Thirty-seven young adolescents and 24 graduate university students were asked to read and think aloud with two texts, one in the history domain and the other in the science domain. Participants also completed a prior-knowledge…

In a series of 3 experiments, the authors investigated the influence of symmetry of variables on children's and adults' data interpretation. They hypothesized that symmetrical (i.e., present/present) variables would support correct interpretations more than asymmetrical (i.e., present/absent) variables. Participants were asked to judge covariation…

A total of 267 five-, seven-, and ten-year-olds (M = 7.62), 147 in Hong Kong and 120 in the United States, evaluated hypothetical personal (and moral) events described as either essential or peripheral to actors' identity. Except for young Chinese in the peripheral condition, straightforward personal events were overwhelmingly evaluated as…

During the preschool years, children develop an understanding of 2 types of real/not-real distinctions: ontological status and authenticity (Bunce & Harris, 2008). Two studies compared 3- to 5-year-old children's real/not-real judgments and justifications for 3 types of contrast involving a real entity and either a fictional character, a child…