Preschoolers, elementary school children, and college students exhibited a spacing effect in the free recall of pictures when learning was intentional. When learning was incidental and a shallow processing task requiring little semantic processing was used during list presentation, young adults still exhibited a spacing effect, but children consistently failed to do so. Children, however, did m...

Over-imitation, which is common in children, is the imitation of elements of an action sequence that are clearly unnecessary for reaching the final goal. A variety of cognitive mechanisms have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. Here, 48 3- and 5-year-olds together with a puppet observed an adult demonstrate instrumental tasks that included an unnecessary action. Failure of the puppet to ...

Adults prefer to interact with others that are similar to themselves. Even slight facial self-resemblance can elicit trust towards strangers. Here we investigate if preschoolers at the age of 5 years already use facial self-resemblance when they make social judgments about others. We found that, in the absence of any additional knowledge about prospective peers, children preferred those who loo...

We explored 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' capacity to draw on a past experience that entailed the lack of a particular resource (in this case, toys) in one room, but not in another, to make an adaptive choice (i.e., place toys in the room where there were none) for a subsequent visit to the two rooms. Children's memory for which room had toys and which room did not was explicitly assessed. Children ...

3 experiments were performed to assess children's ability to solve a problem by analogy to a superficially dissimilar situation. Preschoolers and fifth and sixth graders were asked to solve a problem that allowed multiple solutions. Some subjects were first read a story that included an analogous problem and its solution. When the mapping between the relations involved in the corresponding solu...

Three- and 4-year-old children were asked to judge which of a set of 3 lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among adult informants. Children were invariably accurate when making independent judgments but sometimes deferred to the inaccurate consensus. Nevertheless, the deference displayed by both age groups proved to be circumscribed. When asked t...

PURPOSE This investigation examined the performance of 50 African American children on a reading comprehension test. METHOD Longitudinal data were compared for two groups of students who were preschoolers or kindergartners at Time 1 and elementary-grade students at Time 2. Outcomes were examined for positive predictive relationships based on their oral language and cognitive skills as prescho...

This paper examines the contributions of markedness and a child's grammar to the process of lexical diffusion in phonological acquisition. Archival data from 19 preschoolers with functional phonological delays were submitted to descriptive analyses of productive sound change in fricatives. Children's presenting fricative inventory, the fricatives newly learned, and their position of occurrence ...

We investigated the claim that relational language promotes the development of relational reasoning (Gentner, 2003). Prior research has shown the benefit of spatial relational language (e.g. top, middle, bottom) in preschoolers’ performance in spatial mapping (Loewenstein and Gentner, 2005), suggesting that spatial relational language invites a delineated relational representation. We generaliz...