Preschoolers’ Understanding of How Others Learn Through Action and Instruction

It is widely believed that exploration is a mechanism for young children's learning. The present investigation examines preschoolers’ beliefs about how learning occurs. We asked 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds to articulate how characters in a set of stories learned about a new toy. Younger preschoolers were more likely to overemphasize the role of characters’ actions in learning than older children were (Experiment 1, N = 53). Overall performance improved when the stories explicitly stated that characters were originally ignorant and clarified the characters’ actions, but general developmental trends remained (Experiment 2, N = 48). These data suggest that explicit metacognitive understanding of the relation between actions and learning is developing during the preschool years, which might have implications for how children learn from exploration.     

The Development of Simile Comprehension: From Similarity to Scalar Implicature

Similes require two different pragmatic skills: appreciating the intended similarity and deriving a scalar implicature (e.g., “Lucy is like a parrot” normally implies that Lucy is not a parrot), but previous studies overlooked this second skill. In Experiment 1, preschoolers (N = 48; ages 3–5) understood “X is like a Y” as an expression of similarity. In Experiment 2 (N = 99; ages 3–6, 13) and Experiment 3 (N = 201; ages 3–5 and adults), participants received metaphors (“Lucy is a parrot”) or similes (“Lucy is like a parrot”) as clues to select one of three images (a parrot, a girl or a parrot-looking girl). An early developmental trend revealed that 3-year-olds started deriving the implicature “X is not a Y,” whereas 5-year-olds performed like adults.     

Contribution of Executive Functions to Learning Sequential Actions in Young Children

This study examined whether executive functions impact how flexibly children represent task context in performing repeated sequential actions. Japanese children in Experiments 1 (N = 52; 3–6 years) and 2 (N = 50, 4–6 years) performed sequential actions repeatedly; one group received reminders. Experiment 1 indicated that reminders promote flexible changes in contextual representations. Experiment 2 observed such effects in younger children and showed executive functions were associated with the flexible representation of task context. Reminders did not perfectly compensate for the role of executive functions but wiped out individual differences in executive functions that contribute to children’s acquisition of routines. Therefore, setting goals before context-dependent actions is necessary, but not sufficient, to modulate contextual representations in routines.     

Episodic Future Thinking Is Related to Impulsive Decision Making in Healthy Adolescents

Delay discounting is a stable trait measure of impulsivity. Engaging in episodic future thinking (EFT) can reduce discounting, but whether individual differences in discounting are associated with differences in future thinking remains unclear. Here, this association was tested in healthy adolescents (n = 49, age range = 12–16 years, fluent German speakers, from a large German city). Data collection was between December 2011 and December 2012. Vividness of EFT (assessed via the Autobiographical Memory Interview) was negatively correlated with discounting (r = ?.41, 95% CI [?.63, ?.13], r² = .17). Regression analyses confirmed that this association was stable when controlling for additional variables, including hormonal measures of pubertal maturation and intelligence. EFT may attenuate impulsivity in young people at risk of engaging in problematic behavior.     

Where Culture Takes Hold: “Overimitation” and Its Flexible Deployment in Western,Aboriginal, and Bushmen Children

Children often “overimitate,” comprehensively copying others' actions despite manifest perceptual cues to their causal ineffectuality. The inflexibility of this behavior renders its adaptive significance difficult to apprehend. This study explored the boundaries of overimitation in 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children of three distinct cultures: Westernized, urban Australians (N = 64 in Experiment 1; N = 19 in Experiment 2) and remote communities of South African Bushmen (N = 64) and Australian Aborigines (N = 19). Children overimitated at high frequency in all communities and generalized what they had learned about techniques and object affordances from one object to another. Overimitation thus provides a powerful means of acquiring and flexibly deploying cultural knowledge. The potency of such social learning was also documented compared to opportunities for exploration and practice.     

Order Matters: Children's Evaluation of Underinformative Teachers Depends on Context

The ability to evaluate “sins of omission”—true but pragmatically misleading, underinformative pedagogy—is critical for learning. This study reveals a developmental change in children's evaluation of underinformative teachers and investigates the nature of their limitations. Participants rated a fully informative teacher and an underinformative teacher in two different orders. Six‐ and 7‐year‐olds (N = 28) successfully distinguished the teachers regardless of the order (Experiment 1), whereas 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds (N = 82) succeeded only when the fully informative teacher came first (Experiments 2 and 3). After seeing both teachers, 4‐year‐olds (N = 32) successfully preferred the fully informative teacher (Experiment 4). These results are discussed in light of developmental work in pragmatic implicature, suggesting that young children might struggle with spontaneously generating relevant alternatives for evaluating underinformative pedagogy.     

More Later: Delay of Gratification and Thought About the Future in Children

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children’s delay of gratification. We administered a delay choice task (real rewards), a delay discounting task (hypothetical rewards), a novel future time perception measure, an episodic future thinking (EFT) interview and IQ measures to a sample of 7- to 11-year-olds (N = 132) drawn from a urban predominately white population in N. Ireland. We found a strong correlation between delay choice and delay discounting. Future time perception and EFT were related to delay discounting, however only the relation with future time perception survived controlling for age and IQ. Children who showed greater compression of future time periods were the steepest discounters.     

Differential Effects of Salient Visual Events on Memory-Guided Attention in Adults and Children

Both salient visual events and scene-based memories can influence attention, but it is unclear how they interact in children and adults. In Experiment 1, children (N = 27; ages 7–12) were faster to discriminate targets when they appeared at the same versus different location as they had previously learned or as a salient visual event. In contrast, adults (N = 30; ages 18–31) responded faster only when cued by visual events. While Experiment 2 confirmed that adults (N = 27) can use memories to orient attention, Experiment 3 showed that, even in the absence of visual events, the effects of memories on attention were larger in children (N = 27) versus adults (N = 28). These findings suggest that memories may be a robust source of influence on children's attention.     

Seeing Iconic Gesture Promotes First- and Second-Order Verb Generalization in Preschoolers

This study investigated whether seeing iconic gestures depicting verb referents promotes two types of generalization. We taught 3- to 4-year-olds novel locomotion verbs. Children who saw iconic manner gestures during training generalized more verbs to novel events (first-order generalization) than children who saw interactive gestures (Experiment 1, N = 48; Experiment 2, N = 48) and path-tracing gestures (Experiment 3, N = 48). Furthermore, immediately (Experiments 1 and 3) and after 1 week (Experiment 2), the iconic manner gesture group outperformed the control groups in subsequent generalization trials with different novel verbs (second-order generalization), although all groups saw interactive gestures. Thus, seeing iconic gestures that depict verb referents helps children (a) generalize individual verb meanings to novel events and (b) learn more verbs from the same subcategory.     

Accent,Language, and Race: 4–6‐Year‐Old Children's Inferences Differ by Speaker Cue

Three experiments examined 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6‐year‐olds did not. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both experiments, race played some role in children's geographic inferences. Finally, in Experiment 3 (N = 48), 6‐year‐olds used language to infer both where a speaker was born and where they currently live. These findings reveal critical differences across development in the ways that speaker characteristics are used as inferential cues to a speaker's geographic location and history.     

Infants' Perception of Emotion From Body Movements

Adults recognize emotions conveyed by bodies with comparable accuracy to facial emotions. However, no prior study has explored infants' perception of body emotions. In Experiment 1, 6.5‐month‐olds (n = 32) preferred happy over neutral actions of actors with covered faces in upright but not inverted silent videos. In Experiment 2, infants (n = 32) matched happy and angry videos to corresponding vocalizations when the videos were upright but not when they were inverted. Experiment 3 (n = 16) demonstrated that infants' performance in Experiment 2 was not driven by information from the covered face and head. Thus, young infants are sensitive to emotions conveyed by bodies and match them to affective vocalizations, indicating sophisticated emotion processing capabilities early in life.     

Effects of Montessori Education on the Academic,Cognitive, and Social Development of Disadvantaged Preschoolers: A Randomized Controlled Study in the French Public-School System

Previous research on Montessori preschool education is inconsistent and prone to analytic flexibility. In this preregistered study, disadvantaged preschoolers in a French public school were randomly assigned to either conventional or Montessori classrooms, with the latter being adapted to French public education. Adaptations included fewer materials, shorter work periods, and relatively limited Montessori teacher training. Cross-sectional analyses in kindergarten (N = 176; M_age = 5–6) and longitudinal analyses over the 3 years of preschool (N = 70; M_age = 3–6) showed that the adapted Montessori curriculum was associated with outcomes comparable to the conventional curriculum on math, executive functions, and social skills. However, disadvantaged kindergarteners from Montessori classrooms outperformed their peers on reading (d = 0.68). This performance was comparable to that of advantaged children from an accredited Montessori preschool.     

Children seek help based on how others learn

Do children consider how others learned when seeking help? Across three experiments, German children (N = 536 3-to-8 year olds, 49% female, majority White, tested 2017–2019) preferred to learn from successful active learners selectively by context: They sought help solving a problem from a learner who had independently discovered the solution to a previous problem over those who had learned through instruction or observation, but only when the current problem was novel, yet related, to the learners' problem (Experiment 1). Older, but not younger, children preferred the active learner even when she was offered help (Experiment 2), though only when her discovery was deliberate (Experiment 3). Although a preference to learn from successful active learners emerges early, a genuine appreciation for process beyond outcome increases across childhood.     

Out of Reach,Out of Mind? Infants’ Comprehension of References to Hidden Inaccessible Objects

This study investigated the nature of infants’ difficulty understanding references to hidden inaccessible objects. Twelve‐month‐old infants (N = 32) responded to the mention of objects by looking at, pointing at, or approaching them when the referents were visible or accessible, but not when they were hidden and inaccessible (Experiment I). Twelve‐month‐olds (N = 16) responded robustly when a container with the hidden referent was moved from a previously inaccessible position to an accessible position before the request, but failed to respond when the reverse occurred (Experiment II). This suggests that infants might be able to track the hidden object's dislocations and update its accessibility as it changes. Knowing the hidden object is currently inaccessible inhibits their responding. Older, 16‐month‐old (N = 17) infants’ performance was not affected by object accessibility.     

The Development of Nonsymbolic Probability Judgments in Children

Two experiments were designed to investigate the developmental trajectory of children's probability approximation abilities. In Experiment 1, results revealed 6- and 7-year-old children's (N = 48) probability judgments improve with age and become more accurate as the distance between two ratios increases. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with 7- to 12-year-old children (N = 130) while also accounting for the effect of the size and the perceived numerosity of target objects. Older children's performance suggested the correct use of proportions for estimating probability; but in some cases, children relied on heuristic shortcuts. These results suggest that children's nonsymbolic probability judgments show a clear distance effect and that the acuity of probability estimations increases with age.     

How children revise their beliefs in light of reasons

We investigate how the ability to respond appropriately to reasons provided in discourse develops in young children. In Study 1 (N = 58, Germany, 26 girls), 4- and 5-, but not 3-year-old children, differentiated good from bad reasons. In Study 2 (N = 131, Germany, 64 girls), 4- and 5-year-old children considered both the strength of evidence for their initial belief and the quality of socially provided reasons for an alternative view when deciding whether to change their minds. Study 3 (N = 80, the United States, 42 girls, preregistered) shows that 4- and 5-year-old children also consider meta-reasons (reasons about reasons) in their belief revision. These results suggest that by age 4, children possess key critical thinking capacities for participating in public discourse.     

Transformations and Transfer: Preschool Children Understand Abstract Relations and Reason Analogically in a Causal Task

Previous research suggests that preschoolers struggle with understanding abstract relations and with reasoning by analogy. Four experiments find, in contrast, that 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 168) are surprisingly adept at relational and analogical reasoning within a causal context. In earlier studies preschoolers routinely favored images that share thematic or perceptual commonalities with a target image (object matches) over choices that match the target along abstract relations (relational matches). The present studies embed such choice tasks within a cause-and-effect framework. Without causal framing, preschoolers strongly favor object matches, replicating the results of previous studies. But with causal framing, preschoolers succeed at analogical transfer (i.e., choose relational matches). These findings suggest that causal framing facilitates early analogical reasoning.     

Five-year-old children value reasons in apologies for belief-based accidents

Accidents can be intent-based (unintended action-unintended outcome) or belief-based (intended action-unintended outcome). As compared to intent-based accidents, giving reasons is more crucial for belief-based accidents because the transgressor appears to have intentionally transgressed. In Study 1, UK-based preschoolers who were native English speakers (N = 96, 53 girls, collected 2020–2021) witnessed two intent-based or belief-based accidents; one transgressor apologized, the other apologized with a reason. Five-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, favored the reason-giving transgressor following a belief-based accident but not an intent-based accident (where an apology sufficed). In Study 2, 5-year-olds (N = 48, 25 girls, collected 2021) distinguished between “good” and “bad” reasons for the harm caused. Thus, 5-year-old children recognize when reasons should accompany apologies and account for the quality of these reasons.     

Getting to No: Pragmatic and Semantic Factors in Two‐ and Three‐Year‐Olds' Understanding of Negation

Although infants say “no” early, older children have difficulty understanding its truth‐functional meaning. Two experiments investigate whether this difficulty stems from the infelicity of negative sentences out of the blue. In Experiment 1, given supportive discourse, 3‐year‐olds (N = 16) understood both affirmative and negative sentences. However, with sentence types randomized, 2‐year‐olds (N = 28) still failed. In Experiment 2, affirmative and negative sentences were blocked. Two‐year‐olds (N = 28) now succeeded, but only when affirmatives were presented first. Thus, although discourse felicity seems the primary bottleneck for 3‐year‐olds' understanding of negation, 2‐year‐olds struggle with its semantic processing. Contrary to accounts where negatives are understood via affirmatives, both sentence types were processed equally quickly, suggesting previously reported asymmetries are due to pragmatic accommodation, not semantic processing.     

Carving Metacognition at Its Joints: Protracted Development of Component Processes

Two experiments investigated the development of metacognitive monitoring and control, and conditions under which children engage these processes. In Experiment 1, 5‐year‐olds (N = 30) and 7‐year‐olds (N = 30), unlike adults (N = 30), showed little evidence of either monitoring or control. In Experiment 2, 5‐year‐olds (N = 90) were given performance feedback (aimed at improving monitoring), instruction to follow a particular strategy (aimed at improving control), or both. Across conditions, feedback improved children's monitoring, and instruction improved both monitoring and control. Thus, children's poor metacognitive performance likely reflects a difficulty engaging the component processes spontaneously rather than a lack of metacognitive ability. These findings also suggest that the component processes are distinct, with both undergoing protracted development.