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…

According to Matthew Lipman, one of the founders of the Philosophy for Children (P4C) programme, critical thinking improves reasonableness and the exercise of good judgement, both of which Lipman takes to be necessary to sustaining a democratic society. Against his view, I argue that although critical thinking can be done well or badly, it does…

Recent research has shown that a religious upbringing renders children receptive to ordinarily impossible outcomes, but the underlying mechanism for this effect remains unclear. Exposure to religious teachings might alter children's basic understanding of causality. Alternatively, religious exposure might only affect children's religious…

This investigation examined whether the mode of locomotion matters in how 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-year-old children (N = 91) judge dynamic affordances in a complex perception-action task with significant safety risks. The primarily European American children in the sample came from the area of Iowa City, Iowa and were balanced for gender. The same…

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…

Purpose: We investigated the perception of affordances for vertical jumping-and-reaching and horizontal jumping by children. Method: In the horizontal task, children were asked to judge their ability in the standing long jump. In the vertical task, children were asked to judge the height of a ball that they could run to, jump up, and reach with…

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…

The development of language attitudes and perception of talker regional background was investigated across the life span (N = 240, age range = 4-75 years). Participants rated 12 talkers on dimensions of geographic locality, status, and solidarity. Children could classify some dialects by locality by age 6-7 years and showed adult-like patterns by…

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…

Children and adults show behavioral evidence of psychological overlap between their early, non-symbolic numerical concepts and their later-developing symbolic numerical concepts. An open question is to what extent the common cognitive signatures observed between different numerical notations are coupled with physical overlap in neural processes.…

Philosophy for Democracy is a research project which aims to examine whether and how Philosophy with Children contributes to the development of democratic skills and attitudes. Philosophy with Children seeks to develop children's critical thinking, their ability to judge, enhance their dialogical skills and attitudes and to contribute to their…