Forty-five children with mathematics learning disabilities, with and without comorbid reading disabilities, were compared to 45 normally achieving peers in tasks assessing basic numerical skills. Children with mathematics disabilities were only impaired when comparing Arabic digits (i.e., symbolic number magnitude) but not when comparing…

Young children's naive beliefs about physics are commonly studied as isolated pieces of knowledge. The current paper takes a different approach. It asks whether preschoolers interlink individual beliefs into larger configurations or Gestalts. Such Gestalts bring together knowledge such as how an object's mass relates to its sinking speed, how an…

Young infants use caregivers' emotional expressions to guide their behavior in novel, ambiguous situations. This skill, known as social referencing, likely involves at least 3 separate abilities: (a) looking at an adult in an unfamiliar situation, (b) associating that adult's emotion with the novel situation, and (c) regulating their own…

The purpose of the current article is to highlight the importance of operant techniques in developmental research. Although many researchers employ operant techniques within their individual fields of study, the pervasive nature of these techniques is not often acknowledged in the general literature. The present article describes the history of…

Age-related changes in representational flexibility are a characteristic feature of declarative memory development. The authors suggest that a qualitative shift in the nature of infants' memory representations accounts for increasing memory flexibility with age. We will argue that a comprehensive theory of declarative memory development must (1)…

What capabilities are required for an organism to evince an "explicit" understanding of gaze as a mentalistic phenomenon? One possibility is that mentalistic interpretations of gaze, like concepts of unseen, supernatural beings, are culturally-specific concepts, acquired through cultural learning. These abstract concepts may either require a…

The present investigation explores and presents a theoretical model of instruction--applied literacy in second language education (ALL2E)--and suggests a contemporary view of the roles of grammar and formal evaluation within literature-based second language (L2) classrooms. Essentially, this article addresses the question "How can instruction and…

The experiments described in the lead articles by Kowalski and Zimiles and by O'Hanlon and Roberson examine factors that lead to color term acquisition. These experiments touch on the debate regarding the relative contributions of language and concepts in word learning. In this reflection, we examine how conclusions concerning the debate depend…

This study estimated the independent effects of age and schooling in grades 7-9 on scores obtained on invalid conditional and class syllogisms. The results, which point to a negative, albeit small, effect of out-of-school experience and to a sizeable positive effect of schooling, replicate previous findings in a different age range and support the…

To clarify the nature of the social cognitive skills involved in preschoolers' reenactment of actions on objects, we studied 31- and 41-month-old children's reenactment of intended acts (''failed attempts'') in Meltzoff's [Meltzoff, A. N. (1995)]. Understanding the intentions of others: Reenactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children.…

In Study 1, 10-, 13-, and 16-year-olds were assigned to conditions in which they were instructed to think logically and provided alternative antecedents to the consequents of conditional statements. Providing alternatives improved reasoning on two uncertain logical forms, but decreased logical responding on two certain forms; logic instructions…

Evidence from theory-of-mind tasks suggests that young children have substantial difficulty thinking about multiple object identity and multiple versions of reality. On the other hand, evidence from children's understanding of pretense indicates that children have little trouble understanding dual object identity and counterfactual scenarios that…

Research on deductive reasoning in adolescents and adults has shown that errors in deductive logic are not necessarily due to a lack of logical ability but can stem from an executive failure to inhibit biases. Few studies have examined this dissociation in children. Here, we used a negative priming paradigm with 64 children (8-10 years old) to…

Memory for the position of a moving target is often displaced in the direction of anticipated motion, and this has been referred to as "representational momentum". Such displacement might aid spatial localization by bridging the gap between perception and action, and might reflect a second-order isomorphism between subjective consequences of…

Biological contributions to cognitive development continue to be conceived predominantly along deterministic lines, with proponents of different positions arguing about the preponderance of gene-based versus experience-based influences that organize brain circuits irreversibly during prenatal or early postnatal life, and evolutionary influences…