A violation-of-expectation paradigm was used to test whether infants infer a person based on the presence of hands alone. Infants were familiarized to a pair of hands that extended out from a curtain to play with a rattle, after which the curtain was opened to reveal either a real person or a mannequin. Infants' looking at these outcomes was…

We present two studies that examined developmental differences in the implicit and explicit acquisition of category knowledge. College-attending adults consistently outperformed school-age children on two separate information-integration paradigms due to children's more frequent use of an explicit rule-based strategy. Accuracy rates were also…

Adults make erroneous predictions about object fall despite recognizing when observed displays are correct or incorrect. Prediction requires explicit engagement with conceptual knowledge, whereas recognition can be achieved through tacit processing. Therefore, it has been suggested that the greater challenge imposed by explicit engagement leads to…

The ability to detect and prefer a face when embedded in complex visual displays was investigated in 3- and 6-month-old infants, as well as in adults, through a modified version of the visual search paradigm and the recording of eye movements. Participants "(N" = 43) were shown 32 visual displays that comprised a target face among 3 or 5…

Three experiments were designed to examine how experience affects young children's spatio-symbolic skills over short time scales. Spatio-symbolic reasoning refers to the ability to interpret and use spatial relations, such as those encountered on a map, to solve symbolic tasks. We designed three tasks in which the featural and spatial…

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether children of different ages differ in their ability to reject associative false memories with the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Two different types of manipulations that are thought to facilitate false memory rejection in adults--slowing the presentation rate and issuing explicit…

The importance of early self-regulatory skill has seen increased focus in the applied research literature given the implications of these skills for early school success. A three-factor latent structure of self-regulation consisting of compliance, cool executive control, and hot executive control was tested against alternative models and retained…

We present two experiments exploring whether individuals would be persuaded to imitate the intentional action of an adult model whose actions suggest that the correct way to complete a task is with an inefficient tool. In Experiment 1, children ages 5-10 years and a group of adults watched an adult model reject an efficient tool in favor of one…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) research suggests that the adult capacity is limited to three or four multifeature object representations. Despite evidence supporting a developmental increase in capacity, it remains unclear what the unit of capacity is in children. The current study employed the change detection paradigm to investigate both the…

Children tell prosocial lies for self- and other-oriented reasons. However, it is unclear how motivational and socialization factors affect their lying. Furthermore, it is unclear whether children's moral understanding and evaluations of prosocial lie scenarios (including perceptions of vignette characters' feelings) predict their actual prosocial…

We investigated children's ability to generate associations and how automaticity of associative activation unfolds developmentally. Children generated associative responses using a single associate paradigm (Experiment 1) or a Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM)-like multiple associates paradigm (Experiment 2). The results indicated that children's…

In the field of children's knowledge of the earth, much debate has concerned the question of whether children's naive knowledge--that is, their knowledge before they acquire the standard scientific theory--is coherent (i.e., theory-like) or fragmented. We conducted two studies with large samples (N = 328 and N = 381) using a new paper-and-pencil…

Presents evidence relevant to three models of the way young children perform N-term series tasks: the labeling model, the sequential-contiguity model, and the ordered array or image model. Reexamines children's ability to learn sets of premises which can be assembled into an ordered array. Participating were children three to seven years of age.

Two experiments were conducted to examine children's generality of imitative learning by measuring its transfer to other nonimitative performance conditions. Subjects in the first experiment were 14 children (mean age 8.5 years) from the Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center's Children's Psychiatric Out-Patient…

Predictions about reaction times (RT) from Siegler's model were tested for the balance scale task with 6- to 22-year-olds. Regression analyses provided additional knowledge of the rules. Rule II was reformulated as a rule that always involves the encoding but not always the correct application of the distance rule. RTs provided evidence for use of…