Young children tend to deny the possibility of events that violate their expectations, including events that are merely improbable, like making onion-flavored ice cream or owning a crocodile as a pet. Could this tendency be countered by teaching children more valid strategies for judging possibility? We explored this question by training children…

Recent studies established that making concurrent judgments of learning (JOLs) can significantly alter (typically enhance) memory itself--a "reactivity" effect. The current study recruited 190 Chinese children (M[subscript age] = 8.68 years; 101 female) in 2020 and 2021 to explore the reactivity effect on children's learning, its…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in liking of a conditioned stimulus (CS) consecutive to its repeated pairing with a valent unconditioned stimulus (US). We relied on a multinomial processing tree model to compare the processes underlying EC in middle-aged children (n = 57, M[subscript age] = 8.65, range = 6.94-11.03; 31 females) and…

When semantically-related photos appear with true-or-false trivia claims, people more often rate the claims as true compared to when photos are absent--"truthiness." This occurs even when the photos lack information useful for assessing veracity. We tested whether truthiness changed in magnitude as a function of participants' age in a…

"Place value," which underlies the meanings of multidigits, encompasses the principle of position and base-10 rules. To understand 65, one needs to know that the digits 6 and 5 occupy different positions and thus represent ordered values of different magnitudes (i.e., the "principle of position") and that the value of each…

When faced with entities with potentially ambiguous category membership, adult category judgments are strongly biased toward dangerous and distinctive properties. For example, a cyanide-water mixture is categorized as cyanide. We used a developmental approach to better understand this cross-domain effect, which we term the asymmetric…

Social inequalities limit important opportunities and resources for members of marginalized and disadvantaged groups. Understanding the origins of how children construct their understanding of social inequalities in the context of their everyday peer interactions has the potential to yield novel insights into when--and how--individuals respond to…

Children often infer that descriptive group norms (i.e., how a group is) are prescriptive (i.e., how group members "should be"), and this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency, which biases children against non-conformity, declines with age. We tested whether this age-related decline diverged across different types of processing. Children…

Research on distributive justice indicates that preschool-age children take issues of equity and merit into account when distributing desirable items, but that they often prefer to see desirable items allocated equally in third-party tasks. By contrast, less is known about the development of retributive justice. In a study with 4- to 10-year-old…

Across 3 experiments, we found evidence that information about who owns an artifact influenced 5- to 10-year-old children's and adults' judgments about that artifact's primary function. Children's and adults' use of ownership information was underpinned by their inference that owners are typically familiar with owned artifacts and are therefore…

In a series of 3 experiments, the authors investigated the influence of symmetry of variables on children's and adults' data interpretation. They hypothesized that symmetrical (i.e., present/present) variables would support correct interpretations more than asymmetrical (i.e., present/absent) variables. Participants were asked to judge covariation…

What influences children's normative judgments of conventional rules at different points in development? The current study explored the effects of two contextual factors on children's normative reasoning: the way in which the rules were learned and whether the rules apply to the self or others. Peer dyads practiced a novel collaborative board game…

Studies have shown that prereaders find globally similar non-rhyming pairs (i.e., bell-ball) difficult to judge. Although this effect has been explained as a result of ill-defined lexical representations, others have suggested that it is part of an innate tendency to respond to phonological overlap. In the present study we examined this effect…

A total of 267 five-, seven-, and ten-year-olds (M = 7.62), 147 in Hong Kong and 120 in the United States, evaluated hypothetical personal (and moral) events described as either essential or peripheral to actors' identity. Except for young Chinese in the peripheral condition, straightforward personal events were overwhelmingly evaluated as…

Research with adults has demonstrated a "black sheep effect" (BSE) whereby, relative to evaluations of normative group members, ingroup deviants are derogated more than outgroup deviants. The developmental subjective group dynamics (DSGD) model holds that the BSE should develop during middle childhood when children apply wider social…