Two studies investigated young 2- and 3-year-old Turkish children's developing understanding of normativity and freedom to act in games. As expected, children, especially 3-year-olds, protested more when there was a norm violation than when there was none. Surprisingly, however, no decrease in normative protest was observed even when the…

There are conflicting findings regarding the development of essentialist beliefs about social categories. The present studies address these findings by differentiating between the developments of the relative versus absolute essentialist status of categories. Participants were Israeli Secular Jewish and Muslim Arab kindergarteners, second graders,…

In this study the authors investigated whether children demonstrated the "underconfidence-with-practice" (UWP) effect. This effect is a highly robust metacognitive illusion in which adults become underconfident in their memory performance when asked to predict their memory for the same items across multiple study-test trials. One explanation for…

The purpose of the present study was to explore children's understanding of external symbols by examining the relationship between children's production and comprehension of graphic notations and verbal messages. Fifty-six children between the ages of 5 and 7 years were asked to produce both notations and a spoken message relaying to their…

Previous research suggests that 3-year-olds fail to learn from statistical data when their prior beliefs conflict with evidence. Are children's beliefs entrenched in their folk theories, or can preschoolers rationally update their beliefs? Motivated by a Bayesian account, we conducted a training study to investigate this question. Children (45…

Research suggests that executive function (EF) may distinguish between children who are well- or ill-prepared for kindergarten; however, little is known about the test-retest reliability of measures of EF for children. We aimed to establish a battery of EF measures that are sensitive to both development and individual differences across the…

Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that information about intergroup competition is central to children's representations of social categories. Children (N = 99, 5- and 6-year-olds) were introduced to two novel social categories, which were described as having competing or noncompeting goals, by varying the quantity of a resource in…

In three experiments, 3 1/2- to 6-year-old children were presented with analogical problems in which the protagonists were either real people or fantasy characters. Children were more likely to transfer solutions from the stories about real people rather than the stories about fantasy characters. These results suggest that the use of a fantasy…

Age-related changes in the use of verbal processes for the efficient switching between tasks were investigated in 5-year-old children (N = 32, M age = 5.9 years) and 9-year-old children (N = 32, M age = 9.4 years). Task switching was assessed by means of a cued switching paradigm to examine two switching components: (a) to maintain and select and…

As children develop, they process information more rapidly. The primary aim of this study was to determine whether processing speed in the language domain develops at the same rate as global processing speed. A second aim was to determine the stability of processing speed throughout childhood and adolescence. Children (N = 116) were tested on 10…

This study explored the relations between 5- and 6-year-olds' (N = 40) past social experiences, social knowledge, and interpretation and recall of social situations. Children were read stories depicting a fictional child's behaviors, and path analyses related children's impressions of the story character and story recall to their expectations…

Path analysis was used to test theoretical models of relations among variables known to predict differences in children's memory--strategies, capacity, and metamemory. Children in kindergarten to fourth grade (chronological ages 5 to 11) performed different memory tasks. Several strategies (i.e., sorting, clustering, rehearsal, and self-testing)…