Three experiments examine how preschoolers partition their basic level categories to form subordinate level categories and whether these have inductive potential. Results suggest that contrastive information promotes the emergence of subordinate categories as a basis of inductive inference and newly established subordinate categories can retain…

Analyzed 150 articles from the "Journal of Applied Psychology" (JAP) from 1940 to 1999 to determine statistical reporting practices related to null hypothesis significance testing, American Psychological Association guidelines, and reform recommendations. Findings show little evidence that decades of cogent criticisms by reformers have…

States that although the think-aloud method (TAM) is being used with increasing frequency in studying text comprehension, some skepticism of its value remains. Discusses assumptions behind TAM, aspects of comprehension it can reveal, and directions for research using TAM. Argues that TAM is a useful technique for tracking changes in the contents…

Investigated whether infants infer that a hidden, freely moving object will move continuously and smoothly. Six- to 10- month olds inferred that the object's path would be connected and unobstructed, in accord with continuity. Younger infants did not infer this, in accord with inertia. At 8 and 10 months, knowledge of inertia emerged but remained…

Infants heard sentences in which prosodic structure was either consistent or inconsistent with the syntactic structure. Results suggest that the prosodic information in an individual sentence is not always sufficient to assign a syntactic structure and that learners must engage in active inferential processes to arrive at the correct syntactic…

Cognitive neuroscience is a scientific discipline that aims to determine how brain function gives rise to mental activity. Modern imaging techniques have contributed significantly to the emergence of this discipline. A conceptual framework is presented to help interpret data describing the relationships between cognitive phenomena and brain…

Examined influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-olds' inferences. Found that infants generalized non-obvious property of unlabeled objects to test objects with highly similar shapes. For objects labeled with novel nouns, infants relied on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties. For objects labeled…

Investigates the direction of young children's reading comprehension skill in association with their ability to draw inferences and explores possible sources of inferential failure. Finds that the ability to make inferences was not a by-product of good reading comprehension, rather that good inference skills are a plausible cause of good reading…

Features astronomy activities that teach the value and limitations of inferring. (YDS)

Think-alouds during reading allow teachers to model their thinking by voicing all the things they are noticing, doing, seeing, feeling, and asking as they process the text. Inferencing is essential for students to comprehend a wide variety of texts successfully. This article describes how teachers can use think-alouds to lend their language and…

Children between the ages of 3 and 10 years were presented with a set of pictures representing a contract with bilateral cheating options between a parent and child (Study 1) and between 2 peers (Study 2). The children had to (a) evaluate which situations violated the contract when the relevant information was presented, (b) anticipate the…

Concept properties are an integral part of theories of conceptual representation and processing. To date, little is known about conceptual properties of abstract concepts, such as idea. This experiment systematically compared the content of 18 abstract and 18 concrete concepts, using a feature generation task. Thirty-one participants listed…

Research on dimensional comparison processes has shown that comparing one's own verbal achievements with poorer results in math leads to a higher self-concept of verbal ability. It has been argued that when observers make inferences about a student's academic self-concept, they do not usually have access to dimensional information. In the present…

When a person is characterized categorically with a label (e.g., Linda is a feminist), people tend to think that the attributes associated with that person are central and long lasting (S. Gelman & G. D. Heyman, 1999). This bias, which is related to category-based induction and stereotyping, has been thought to arise because a category label…

This article reconsiders the issue of clinical versus statistical prediction. The term clinical is widely used to denote 1 pole of 2 independent axes: the observer whose data are being aggregated (clinician/expert vs. lay) and the method of aggregating those data (impressionistic vs. statistical). Fifty years of research suggests that when…