Learning must be constrained for it to lead to productive generalizations. Although biology is undoubtedly an important source of constraints, prior experience may be another, leading learners to represent input in ways that are more conducive to some generalizations than others, and/or to up- and down-weight features when entertaining…

Given minimal evidence about novel objects, children might learn only relationships among the specific entities, or they might make a more abstract inference, positing classes of entities and the relations that hold among those classes. Here we show that preschoolers (mean: 57 months) can use sparse data about perceptually unique objects to infer…

In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different…

The emergence of modern humans with their extraordinary cognitive capacities is ascribed to a novel type of cognitive computational process (sustained non-routine multi-level operations) required for abstract projectuality, held to be the common denominator of the cognitive capacities specific to modern humans. A brain operation (latching) that…

Mental-content verbs such as "think," "believe," "imagine" and "hope" seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different,…

Kahneman and Tversky's critique of Cohen's position on adults' probability reasoning is not valid. If they think Baconian logic is normatively unsound, the onus is on them to explain why. It is valid and useful because nature itself is full of causal processes. (Author/RD)

Can children reason the Bayesian way? We argue that the answer to this question depends on how numbers are represented, because a representation can do part of the computation. We test, for the first time, whether Bayesian reasoning can be elicited in children by means of natural frequencies. We show that when information was presented to fourth,…

A study conjectured that individuals make mental models of events when they reason from premises involving temporal relations. Several experiments using school children and university students as subjects found that problems that required one mental model elicited more correct responses than problems that required multiple mental models. (BC)

Cohen's (TM 504 890) formal rules of intuitive probability lack normative or descriptive appeal, and his interpretation of the author's findings is not compelling. (CP)

Reports five experiments that challenge the view that young children's understanding of race is based primarily on superficial differences in appearance. Found that young children's inferences about human racial variation involved domain-specific reasoning that parallelled, but were distinct from, common sense understanding of naive biology. (DR)

Several observations about the way humans conceive of attributes, changes, and covariation of stimuli are presented as indications for the existence of a conceptual hierarchy of dimensions in which time dominates space, and space dominates every other dimension. (Author)

Literature on relational reasoning mainly focuses on the performance question. It is typically argued that problem difficulty relies on the number of ''mental models'' compatible with the problem. However, no study has ever investigated the wording of conclusions that participants formulate. In the present work, we analyze the relational terms…

Three experiments examined strategies for solving suppositional deductions to compare control structures proposed by rule theory and model theory. Puzzles were based on assertors who may be truth-tellers and their assertions about their truth-telling status. Reasoners made backward and forward inferences, found generating suppositions difficult,…

Protocols of people attempting to solve syllogistic problems and explaining how they reached their conclusions were examined. Two main groups of subjects were identified. One group represented the relationship between classes in a spatial manner supplemented by verbal representation. The other group used a primarily verbal representation. A…

Children aged 6 through 9 made drawings of cubes and simple abstract designs, with or without looking at their hand. Copying errors and differences between the age groups were discussed in terms of visual realism (perspective drawing) compared with intellectual realism (structural essentials copied without a unified perspective view). (CTM)