Unlike adults, young children think that many weird and unlikely events are impossible. Existing theories have argued that this developmental shift is driven primarily by age-related changes in knowledge as well as an increasing ability to reflect on one's modal intuitions. However, this intuition + reflection model fails to explain…

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…

Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

What do cows drink? The correct answer is water, but many are tempted to say milk. The disposition to override an intuitive response (milk) with a more analytic response (water) is known as "cognitive reflection." Tests of cognitive reflection predict a wide range of skills and abilities in adults. In this article, we discuss the…

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…

Past research has shown a discrepancy in young infants' use of height information in occlusion and containment events--a pattern typically accounted for by event categorization and rule learning. Broadening these theories, the present experiment examined the role of comparison in young infants' reasoning about physical events. We rotated a typical…

Caregivers' moral reactions to young children's moral transgressions are informative environmental responses for children's developing understanding of morality. One central question concerns by which age parents hold their children responsible for moral transgressions. This study indirectly investigated this question by having parents and…

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 origins and development of our geometric intuitions have been debated for millennia. The present study links children's developing intuitions about the properties of planar triangles to their developing abilities to read purely geometric maps. Six-year-old children are limited when navigating by maps that depict only the sides of a triangle in…

Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by "all," "most," and…

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This…

The study examined intuitive perceptions of early childhood education students regarding education and care of children from birth to age 3 in Jewish and Arab societies. Research included 182 education students majoring in early childhood at three Israeli colleges. Data were collected via a questionnaire covering five topics: What is the most…

Psychological intuitions about natural category structure do not always correspond to the true structure of the world. The current study explores young children's responses to conflict between intuitive structure and authoritative feedback using a semi-supervised learning (Zhu et al., 2007) paradigm. In three experiments, 160 children between the…

We present an algorithmic model for the development of children's intuitive theories within a hierarchical Bayesian framework, where theories are described as sets of logical laws generated by a probabilistic context-free grammar. We contrast our approach with connectionist and other emergentist approaches to modeling cognitive development. While…

Dual-process theories have gained increasing importance in psychology. The contrast that they describe between an old intuitive and a new deliberative mind seems to make these theories especially suited to account for development. Accordingly, this special issue aims at presenting the latest applications of dual-process theories to cognitive…