Searching and planning: young children's reasoning about past and future event sequences

Six experiments examined children's ability to make inferences using temporal order information. Children completed versions of a task involving a toy zoo; one version required reasoning about past events (search task) and the other required reasoning about future events (planning task). Children younger than 5 years failed both the search and the planning tasks, whereas 5-year-olds passed both (Experiments 1 and 2). However, when the number of events in the sequence was reduced (Experiment 3), 4-year-olds were successful on the search task but not the planning task. Planning difficulties persisted even when relevant cues were provided (Experiments 4 and 5). Experiment 6 showed that improved performance on the search task found in Experiment 3 was not due to the removal of response ambiguity.     

Heuristic Reasoning in Chemistry: Making decisions about acid strength

The characterization of students’ reasoning strategies is of central importance in the development of instructional strategies that foster meaningful learning. In particular, the identification of shortcut reasoning procedures (heuristics) used by students to reduce cognitive load can help us devise strategies to facilitate the development of more analytical ways of thinking. The central goal of this qualitative study was thus to investigate heuristic reasoning as used by organic chemistry college students, focusing our attention on their ability to predict the relative acid strength of chemical compounds represented using explicit composition and structural features (i.e., structural formulas). Our results indicated that many study participants relied heavily on one or more of the following heuristics to make most of their decisions: reduction, representativeness, and lexicographic. Despite having visual access to reach structural information about the substances included in each ranking task, many students relied on isolated composition features to make their decisions. However, the specific characteristics of the tasks seemed to trigger heuristic reasoning in different ways. Although the use of heuristics allowed students to simplify some components of the ranking tasks and generate correct responses, it often led them astray. Very few study participants predicted the correct trends based on scientifically acceptable arguments. Our results suggest the need for instructional interventions that explicitly develop college chemistry students’ abilities to monitor their thinking and evaluate the effectiveness of analytical versus heuristic reasoning strategies in different contexts.     

Children's memory for orientation in the absence of external cues

Some have interpreted children's reliance on external visual cues as evidence that they are unable to use internal cues for orientation. This hypothesis was examined in experiment 1, where 24 preschoolers were tested on left-right, vertical-horizontal, and mirror-image oblique discriminations under essentially context-free conditions. Subjects succeeded on all discrimination problems and performed equally well on vertical-horizontal and mirror-image oblique discriminations. Thus, preschoolers can use an internal frame of reference to code orientation. Experiment 2 contrasted children's performance under context-free conditions with their ability to discriminate orientation in the presence of external visual cues. Children who had discriminated left-right oblique and nonoblique mirror-image forms in experiment 1 failed to so discriminate in experiment 2. This result is discussed in terms of a breakdown in the ability to use internal cues when external visual cues are available.     

Effect of outcome valence on positive and negative patterning in human causal reasoning

The importance of configural cues and whether a situation involves beneficent or maleficent outcomes was investigated in two experiments on human causal reasoning, based on experienced causal information. Participants learned positive and negative patterning discriminations involving either beneficent or maleficent outcomes in a health-reasoning task and in a social-reasoning task. With maleficent outcomes, positive patterning was consistently easier to learn than negative patterning, a positive patterning advantage that is predicted by current associative theories and commonly taken as evidence for configural cues. However, with beneficent outcomes, the two discrimination tasks were not significantly different in ease of learning, a result not predicted by current theories. The reliable positive patterning effect found with maleficent outcomes broadens the range of conditions in which the effect can be shown in causal reasoning. The novel effect of outcome valence poses an interesting theoretical challenge for attempts to account for the relation between learning about individual cues and combinations of those cues.     

Using virtual microscopy to scaffold learning of pathology: a naturalistic experiment on the role of visual and conceptual cues

New representational technologies, such as virtual microscopy, create new affordances for medical education. In the article, a study on the following two issues is reported: (a) How does collaborative use of virtual microscopy shape students’ engagement with and learning from virtual slides of tissue specimen? (b) How do visual and conceptual cues scaffold students’ reasoning? Fifteen pairs of medical students participated in two sessions in which the students used a virtual microscope as a diagnostic tool in the context of learning pathology. The slides provided the students with varying levels of visual and conceptual cueing. The sessions were videotaped, and the students’ reasoning while using the microscope was analysed. The students’ written answers were analysed in terms of the findings they made and the diagnoses suggested. At a general level, the results show that students engage actively in this kind of virtually-mediated environment. The visual and/or conceptual cues improve students’ performance, and guide the students’ perception and reasoning in a manner that is productive from the point of view of learning to make clinically relevant observations. Scaffolding students’ reasoning process through cues furthermore assists the students in avoiding the most obvious pitfalls such as overlooking critical areas of a specimen. Overall, visual and conceptual cues improve students’ reasoning in perceptual and cognitive terms, while still allowing space for the making of “relevant mistakes” that may further the students’ diagnostic skills.     

Young Children's Understanding of Fictional versus Epistemic Mental Representations: Imagination and Belief

In 2 studies, 3- and 4-year-old children's ability to reason about the relation between mental representations and reality was examined. In the first study, children received parallel false belief and "false" imagination tasks. Results revealed that children performed better on imagination tasks than on belief tasks. The second study demonstrated that, when various alternative explanations for better performance on the imagination task were controlled for, children still performed significantly better when reasoning about another person's imagination than when reasoning about another person's belief. These findings suggest that children's understanding that mental representations can differ from reality may emerge first with respect to representations that do not purport to represent reality truthfully.     

Developmental and individual differences in children's on-line representations of dynamic social events

Developmental and clinical differences in children's on-line understanding of ongoing social events were examined. Boys with (n = 38) and without (n = 41) Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) were compared. Prior social schemes and integrative processes were hypothesized to influence children's representation of incoming social cues. Younger children and children with ADHD were expected to differ from older children and children without ADHD, respectively, in what they encoded and how they organized the encoded information. Differences in on-line representation were postulated to underlie differences in children's recall and social reasoning. Children's prior social schemes, looking time and on-line verbal protocols, recall, and social reasoning were assessed. Younger boys and ADHD boys showed less integrated on-line representations, accounting for poorer recall and reasoning.     

The Effects of Verbal Mediation Training on the Problem‐Solving Skills of Children with Partial Sight and Children without Visual Impairments

Thirty children with partial sight and 30 children with unimpaired sight aged between 8 and 12 years were randomly assigned to either verbal mediation or visual mediation training regimes. Participants were asked to complete four variations of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle and success on the task was judged on the basis of the number of moves and time taken to complete the puzzles. Children with visual impairments had some difficulty in adjusting to the requirements of the problem‐solving tasks. However, on the final and most difficult of the tasks (a four‐disc problem), the children with impaired sight performed very much like participants without visual impairments. The effect of verbal mediation training was superior to that of visual mediation training in the final trials of the four‐disc problem‐solving period for both children with partial sight and children without visual impairments.     

Effects of visual cues upon the vocational task performance of students with mental retardation

Abstract

Numerous studies demonstrate that visual cues combined with trainer instruction enable individuals with mental retardation to complete simple to complex tasks. The actual effect of the visual cues upon target behavior is unclear. Few investigators have used picture reading pretests to determine initial picture reading skills prior to the introduction of trainer instruction. In this study we compared the effects of trainer demonstrations to four visual cue conditions across easy, moderate, and difficult task performance of secondary‐aged students with mental retardation. The results indicated that photographs and line drawings were more effective than demonstrations with mild and moderate mental retardation groups working complex tasks. There were no differences between visual cues and demonstration conditions across task levels for students with severe and profound mental retardation.     

Preschoolers’ use of count information to judge relative quantity

We examined preschool children's use of count information in making quantity judgments. Study 1 involved 35 children 3–5 years old using a balance-scale task to judge relative quantity with or without count information provided. Study 2 replicated and extended the exploration as 54 children 3–4 years old judged relative quantity in multiple counting contexts. Children who were given count information successfully used count information in quantity evaluation when visual cues were not useful. Limited experience of counting skills, strategy choice, and limited processing capacity are each discussed as potential explanations. Implications for early childhood practice and teacher education, as well as directions for future research are explored.     

Young Children's Trust in Their Mother's Claims: Longitudinal Links With Attachment Security in Infancy

In a longitudinal study of attachment, children ( N = 147) aged 50 and 61 months heard their mother and a stranger make conflicting claims. In 2 tasks, the available perceptual cues were equally consistent with either person's claim but children generally accepted the mother's claims over those of the stranger. In a 3rd task, the perceptual cues favored the stranger's claims, and children generally accepted her claims over those of the mother. However, children's pattern of responding varied by attachment status. The strategy of relying on the mother or the stranger, depending on the available perceptual cues, was especially evident among secure children. Insecure-avoidant children displayed less reliance on their mother's claims, irrespective of the available cues, whereas insecure-resistant children displayed more.     

Relative and absolute thinking in visual estimation processes

This study has two main goals: (1) to investigate the processes involved in visual estimation (part I of the study), and (2) to investigate the processes of judgment in visual estimation situations, which mostly involved proportional reasoning (part II). The study was conducted with 9-year old children in the third grade. Four strategies were expressed by the children in visual estimation situations. Exposure to a unit in the Agam project, designed to enhance visual estimation capabilities resulted in changes in the children's strategies. These changes reflected the processes by which children overcame their limited ability to process visual information. The development of proportional reasoning was investigated through a series of judgment situations. Although, as was expected, most of the children showed an additive behavior, these situations stimulated some children towards qualitative proportional reasoning, where easy/difficult considerations played an important role.     

Children''s Use of Anatomically Detailed Dolls to Recount an Event

The use of anatomically detailed dolls in child sexual abuse investigations has raised several controversial issues related to important theoretical questions in developmental psychology. The present study was designed to examine some of these issues in a methodologically sound experiment. 80 3- and 5-year-old children experienced a social interaction with a male confederate and were later tested under 1 of 4 recall conditions: reenactment with anatomically detailed dolls, reenactment with regular dolls, free recall with visual cues, or free recall without visual cues. The children were also asked a variety of specific and misleading questions, some of them dealing with acts associated with abuse ("He took your clothes off, didn't he?"). Both anatomically detailed and regular dolls along with other props aided 5-year-olds more than 3-year-olds in recounting the event. To use increased rather than decreased age differences. Anatomically detailed dolls did not foster false reports of abuse. Overall, 3-year-olds were more suggestible than 5-year-olds. The findings have implications for children's testimony in child abuse cases and for psychological theories concerning the effects of stimulus support on children's memory.     

Children''s Understanding of Cognitive Cuing: How to Manipulate Cues to Fool a Competitor

4-6-year-old children's understanding of cognitive cuing was studied in 2 experiments using a strategic interaction paradigm. Children could fool a competitor by hiding targets in locations that were labeled with semantically weakly associated cues and help a cooperative partner by hiding them in semantically highly associated locations. Very few 4-year-olds, half the 5-year-olds, and almost all 6-years-olds appropriately chose semantically highly vs. weakly associated hiding places to make the targets easy vs. difficult to find. The second experiment showed that 4-year-olds did not strategically manipulate cues as sources of information, although they themselves proficiently used them as such in a search task. These findings are discussed with regard to research on children's developing understanding of origins of knowledge and belief and with regard to recent claims that young preschoolers possess a metacognitive understanding of cognitive cuing.     

Preschool children's reasoning about ability

Young children's reasoning about ability was investigated among 155 preschoolers (M = 4 years, 10 months) across 3 studies. Results suggest that preschoolers are sensitive to mental state information when making judgments about another child's ability: They judged a child who finds a task easy to be smarter than one who finds the same task hard. Systematic patterns of errors on recall tasks suggest that preschoolers perceive positive correlations between (a) exerting effort and experiencing academic success, and (b) being nice and having high academic ability. Results from a comparison group of forty 9- to 10-year-olds (M = 9 years, 10 months) suggest that the preschool findings generally reflect emerging patterns of reasoning about ability that persist into later childhood, but that the perceived correlations between high effort and academic outcomes and between social and academic traits diminish with age.     

Anxiety and the Processing of Emotionally Threatening Stimuli: Distinctive Patterns of Selective Attention among High- and Low-Test-Anxious Children

There is substantial evidence that clinically referred and nonreferred high-anxious adults selectively shift attention toward threatening stimuli. In contrast, low-anxious adults shift attention away from threatening stimuli. Recent evidence suggests that clinically referred anxious children also selectively attend to threatening information. The present study tested for the presence of such a bias in a nonreferred sample of high-anxious children and also included the first adequate test for an attentional bias away from threat among low-anxious children. 20 high- and 20 low-test-anxious children, 11–14 years of age, completed a task in which visual attention was indexed by latency to detect probes following emotionally threatening and neutral words. Results supported the predicted attentional bias toward threat cues among high-test-anxious children. Unexpectedly, the predicted attentional bias away from threat cues was found only among low-test-anxious boys. Low-test-anxious girls attended equally to threatening and neutral words. In sum, selective attention mechanisms influence children's processing of threatening information and may play a role in the regulation and dysregulation of childhood anxiety.     

自闭症儿童缺乏"心理理论"吗?——基于神经现象学的解读

心理理论这一概念将儿童心智阅读能力视作一种基于规则或逻辑的推理,并以此设计出了错误信念任务等经典任务.大量研究显示自闭症儿童在这些任务上的表现不佳,因此该群体被认为是缺少心理理论的"心灵盲".基于对心理理论概念及其元理论的分析,并在神经现象学视角下结合镜像神经元研究、自闭症儿童的主观报告及其行为的现象学描述,本文尝试揭...     

Identifying Essential Epistemic Heuristics for Guiding Mechanistic Reasoning in Science Learning

Mechanistic reasoning, or reasoning systematically through underlying factors and relationships that give rise to phenomena, is a powerful thinking strategy that allows one to explain and make predictions about phenomena. This article synthesizes and builds on existing frameworks to identify essential characteristics of students’ mechanistic reasoning across scientific content areas. We argue that these characteristics can be represented as epistemic heuristics, or ideas about how to direct one’s intellectual work, that implicitly guide mechanistic reasoning. We use this framework to characterize middle school students’ written explanatory accounts of two phenomena in different science content areas using these heuristics. We demonstrate evidence of heuristics in students’ accounts and show that the use of the heuristics was related to but distinct from science content knowledge. We describe how the heuristics allowed us to characterize and compare the mechanistic sophistication of account construction across science content areas. This framework captures elements of a crosscutting practical epistemology that may support students in directing the construction of mechanistic accounts across content areas over time, and it allows us to characterize that progress.     

Hearing Where the Eyes See: Children Use an Irrelevant Visual Cue When Localizing Sounds

To reduce sensory uncertainty, humans combine cues from multiple senses. However, in everyday life, many co‐occurring cues are irrelevant to the task at hand. How do humans know which cues to ignore? And does this ability change with development? This study shows the ability to ignore cross‐modal irrelevant information develops late in childhood. Participants performed a sound discrimination task, with or without an irrelevant visual flash, presented synchronously in front of them. Adults ignored the irrelevant visual information, while 7‐ to 10‐year‐olds' responses were biased toward the flash location. The findings show that acquiring mature cue combination mechanisms is a multifaceted process that includes learning to ignore irrelevant cues, as well as to optimally combine relevant cues.     

Explicit reasoning, creativity and co-construction in primary school children's collaborative activities

This paper describes research that explored the question of whether or not it is possible to characterise and teach a single type of educationally productive talk. We analysed and compared the quality of children's interactional strategies when jointly working on a reasoning task and a psycholinguistic task. The latter involved writing an integrated summary of three related texts. Sixth grade primary school children (11–12 years old) solved these two tasks as pre- and post-tests before and after training in the use of ‘Exploratory Talk’ (ET) to think together and argue as well as in strategies for producing summaries. After training, children improved substantially in the use of ET when solving the reasoning but not the psycholinguistic task. However, using ethnography of communication methods to analyse the talk further around the latter task revealed that both the number and quality of communicative events and acts increased importantly. These changes were accompanied by a significant improvement in the quality of the summaries produced. These findings suggest that the requirement for explicit reasoning in the definition and analysis of ET may be task dependent. To account for the common features of the educationally productive talk in the two settings, we propose the more inclusive concept of co-constructive talk to characterise the inter-subjective orientation, social ground rules and communicative actions that support effective collaboration, co-ordination and creativity.