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…

One of the many sources of information easily available to children is the internet and the millions of websites providing accurate, and sometimes inaccurate, information. In the current investigation, we examined children's ability to use credibility information about websites when learning about environmental sustainability. In two studies,…

Verbal testimony about reality status is critical but often contradictory. These studies address whom children consider reliable sources of information about reality and how they evaluate conflicting testimony. In Study 1, seventy 4- to 8-year-olds heard an adult or child provide testimony about how to cook food and use toys, and about the reality…

In collaborative problem solving, children produce and evaluate arguments for proposals. We investigated whether 3- and 5-year-olds (N = 192) can produce and evaluate arguments against those arguments (i.e., counter-arguments). In Study 1, each child within a peer dyad was privately given a reason to prefer one over another solution to a task. One…

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…

As children increasingly interact with digital voice assistants, it is important to know whether they treat these devices as reliable information sources. Two studies investigated children's trust in and recall of statements made by a novel voice assistant and a human informant. In Study 1, children ages 4-5 (M[subscript age] = 5.05; 20 boys, 20…

"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…

Young children show remarkably sophisticated abilities to evaluate others. Yet their abilities to engage in proportional moral evaluation undergoes protracted development. Namely, young children evaluate someone who shares "absolutely" more as being "nicer" than someone who shares "proportionally" more (e.g., sharing…

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…

When presented with a claim that contradicts their intuitions, do children seize opportunities to empirically verify such claims or do they simply acquiesce to what they have been told? To answer this question, we conducted a replication of Ronfard et al. (conducted in the People's Republic of China) in two countries with distinct religious and…

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more…

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…

When learning about the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena such as germs or religious phenomena such as God, children are receptive to the testimony of other people. Research in Western cultures has shown that by 5 to 6 years of age, children--like adults--are confident about the existence of both scientific and religious phenomena. We…