From objects to quantities: developments in preschool children's judgments about aggregate amount

The impact of object boundaries on children's developing quantitative reasoning was examined in a study of children's judgments about aggregate amount. Children at ages 3, 4, and 5 years were asked to help a Cookie Monster get as much to eat as possible by choosing between alternative collections that differed in the number and size of the cookies they contained and also in aggregate amount. Results indicated that children were heavily influenced by the size of individual cookies at 3 years of age but were generally unsuccessful in aggregating size information across multiple cookies until 5 years. The contrast between children's sensitivity to object sizes from an early age and the relatively late achievement of accurate judgments of aggregate amount underscores the significance for quantitative development of the distinction between discrete objects and mathematical quantities.     

Function, goals and intention: children's teleological reasoning about objects

A fundamental aspect of adult thought is the 'teleological' tendency to assume that objects exist for a purpose. When seeing an unfamiliar artifact or strange anatomical part on an animal, the first question an adult will usually ask is 'what's that for?' - a query that assumes that the object can be teleologically explained in terms of its function. Current debate focuses on the origin and scope of teleological thought, and its role in children's emerging theories of the biological world. The bias to view objects as 'designed for a purpose' probably derives from children's privileged understanding of intentional behavior and artifacts. This makes children prone to a 'promiscuous teleology' in which artifacts and natural objects of all types are viewed as existing for a function. Because of this, I argue that we should be cautious about taking the existence of an early teleological bias as evidence that there is biological understanding that exists independently of a psychological construal of living things.     

Sample representativeness affects whether judgments are influenced by base rate or sample size

We investigated how people use base rates and sample size information when combining data to make overall probability judgments. Participants considered two samples from an animal population in order to estimate the probability of that animal being aggressive. Participants' judgments were influenced by subpopulation base rates when they were provided and linked to specific samples. When samples were not identified as coming from different subpopulations, judgments typically reflected sample size information. We conclude that 1) People can use base rates when combining samples to make an inference; 2) People can correctly use sampling information to determine when to use base rates, and 3) People are able to consider base rate and sample size information at the same time. Additionally, we found that individuals' numeracy correlates with the extent to which base rate and sample size information is used.     

Relative distance judgments of familiar and unfamiliar objects viewed under representatively natural conditions

Carlson and Tassone (1971) reported that an object of familiar size viewed at an appreciable distance is perceived to be more distant than an unfamiliar object. Six experiments were designed to examine this effect. The results indicated that the effect is not dependent on Carlson and Tassone's method for assessing perceived relative distance; it occurs at some minimum viewing distance; it is unlikely to be caused by stimulus attributes confounded with the familiar versus unfamiliar size dichotomy; appears to be specific to judgments of the familiar object itself; and it does not occur if the familiar and unfamiliar objects have a common reference target. These findings are discussed with respect to the issue of whether familiar size influences perceived distance as distinct from influencing judgments of distance.     

Remembering kinds: new evidence that categories are privileged in children's thinking

What are the representations and learning mechanisms that underlie conceptual development? The present research provides evidence in favor of the claim that this process is guided by an early-emerging predisposition to think and learn about abstract kinds. Specifically, three studies (N = 192) demonstrated that 4- to 7-year-old children have better recall for novel information about kinds (e.g., that dogs catch a bug called “fep”) than for similar information about individuals (e.g., that a particular dog catches a bug called “fep”). By showing that children are particularly likely to retain information about kinds, this work not only provides a first empirical demonstration of a phenomenon that may be key to conceptual development but also makes it apparent that young children’s thinking is suffused with abstractions rather than being perceptually-based and concrete.     

Biases in children's and adults' moral judgments

Two experiments examined biases in children's (5/6- and 7/8-year-olds) and adults' moral judgments. Participants at all ages judged that it was worse to produce harm when harm occurred (a) through action rather than inaction (omission bias), (b) when physical contact with the victim was involved (physical contact principle), and (c) when the harm was produced as a direct means to an end rather than as an unintended but foreseeable side effect of the action (intention principle). The youngest participants, however, did not incorporate benefit when making judgments about situations in which harm to one individual resulted in benefit to five individuals. Older participants showed some preference for benefit resulting from action (commission) as opposed to inaction (omission). The findings are discussed in the context of the theory that moral judgments result, in part, from the operation of an inherent, intuitive moral faculty compared with the theory that moral judgments require development of necessary cognitive abilities.     

Favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's confidence judgments

Two studies are presented in which favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's meta‐cognitive monitoring processes are examined. Previously reported findings have shown that especially children's uncertainty monitoring (in contrast to certainty monitoring) poses specific problems for children in their elementary school years. When interviewing children about an observed event, answerable and unanswerable questions in two question formats (unbiased and misleading) were used, and 8‐ and 10‐year‐old children as well as adults were asked to rate their confidence on a three‐point scale concerning each response. Results of Study 1 show that accuracy instructions and the option to answer with ‘I don't know’ inflate children's level of confidence because uncertain answers are withheld. Results of Study 2 revealed that children's difficulty with uncertainty monitoring may lie in a cognitive overload during the interview because immediate confidence judgments were less precise and less adequate compared with delayed confidence judgments. Participants' rating of their uncertainty after having erroneously provided an answer to an unanswerable question proved that children aged 8 years and older are able to experience and report levels of uncertainty but, as was shown for answerable questions, these emerging competencies are dependent on favourable task conditions.     

English derivational suffix frequency and children's stress judgments

Considering the importance of word and stem frequency in the adult lexical processing literature, and the effect of input frequency on children's acquisition of words (Tardif, Shatz, and Naigles, 1997), it was hypothesized that children's acquisition of English morphologically conditioned stress alternations would be affected by the frequency with which children were exposed to different stress-changing suffixes (e.g., -tion, -ity, and -ic). Study 1 determined the proportional representation of suffixes in a children's literature corpus, thereby allowing the suffix variable to be established. Study 2 empirically examined the effect of suffix frequency on school-aged children's judgments of primary stress placement. Findings suggest that age and suffix frequency both play a role in children's awareness of stress placement.     

When standards are wide of the mark: nonselective superiority and inferiority biases in comparative judgments of objects and concepts

People are frequently required to judge how particular group members measure up against others in their group. According to the local-comparisons-general-standards (LOGE) approach, in these member-to-group comparisons, people fail to use the normatively appropriate local (group) standard and are infelicitously affected by a more general standard (involving instances from outside the judged group). Within positive groups, target group members are judged superior to the other members of the group, and within negative groups, inferior. To date, these nonselective superiority and inferiority biases have been demonstrated solely in judgments about human beings. In 6 experiments, nonselective biases were found in perceptual, affective, and cognitive judgments of nonhuman targets, objects, and concepts, thus supporting a cognitive rather than a social account.     

Development and natural kinds

While philosophers tend to consider a single type of causal history, biologists distinguish between two kinds of causal history: evolutionary history and developmental history. This essay studies the peculiarity of development as a criterion for the individuation of biological traits and its relation to form, function, and evolution. By focusing on examples involving serial homologies and genetic reprogramming, we argue that morphology (form) and function, even when supplemented with evolutionary history, are sometimes insufficient to individuate traits. Developmental mechanisms bring in a novel aspect to the business of classification—identity of process-type—according to which entities are type-identical across individuals and natural kinds in virtue of the fact that they form and develop through similar processes. These considerations bear important metaphysical implications and have potential applications in several areas of philosophy.     

Judgments about judgments: the dissociation of consideration price and transaction commitment judgments

There are many contexts in which people make judgments about prior judgments. For example, Internet shopping bots (e.g., NexTag.com) allow consumers to search for products and, if the price is too high, list a price at which they would consider making the purchase (i.e., base judgment). If the price drops to this level, the vendor generates an e-mail inviting the consumer to execute the transaction at the reduced price (i.e., contingent judgment). The authors show that the consideration price depends on the content of retrieved information, whereas the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price depends on the ease-of-retrieving the information. The authors use different offer prices to encourage the consumer to retrieve information consistent with different product quality levels. The authors also select offer prices so that information retrieval is more difficult at moderate offer prices than at high or low offer prices. Accordingly, the authors show that the consideration price increases as the offer price increases, but the willingness to execute the transaction at the consideration price is greater when there are high and low, as opposed to moderate, offer prices.     

Factors affecting the reliability of clinical judgments about the function of children's school-refusal behavior.

Conducted two studies to examine the interrater reliability, test-retest stability, and the effect of various clinician variables, such as years of clinical experience, theoretical orientation, and prior experience with children, on clinical judgments about the reinforcement functions of children's school-refusal behavior. Results indicated that the judgments by individual clinicians were of questionable reliability. Judgments aggregated across 3 clinicians yielded acceptable interrater and test-retest reliability in Study 1, but a greater number of clinicians were necessary to achieve acceptable reliability in Study 2. Years of clinical experience and training were the only clinician variables related to the reliability of judgments about reinforcement functions. Several recommendations for the clinical assessment of the function of children's school-refusal behavior are discussed.     

Confidence judgments in children's and adults' event recall and suggestibility

The present work investigated the role of children's and adults' metacognitive monitoring and control processes for unbiased event recall tasks and for suggestibility. Three studies were conducted in which children and adults indicated their degree of confidence that their answers were correct after (Study 1) and before (Study 2) answering either unbiased or misleading questions or (Study 3) forced-choice recognition questions. There was a strong tendency for overestimation of confidence regardless of age and question format. However, children did not lack the principal metacognitive competencies when these questions were asked in a neutral interview. Under misleading questioning, in contrast, children's monitoring skills were seriously impaired. Within each age group, better metacognitive differentiation was positively associated with recall accuracy in the suggestive interview.     

Representational momentum and children's sensori-motor representations of objects

Recent research has shown that 2-year-olds fail at a task that ostensibly only requires the ability to understand that solid objects cannot pass through other solid objects. Two experiments were conducted in which 2- and 3-year-olds judged the stopping point of an object as it moved at varying speeds along a path and behind an occluder, stopping at a barrier visible above the occluder. Three-year-olds were able to take into account the barrier when searching for the object, while 2-year-olds were not. However, both groups judged faster moving objects to travel farther as indicated by their incorrect reaches. Thus, the results show that young children's sensori-motor representations exhibit a form of representational momentum. This unifies the perceptually based representations of early childhood with adults' dynamic representations that incorporate physical regularities but that are also available to conscious reasoning.     

Attention to context: U.S. and Japanese children's emotional judgments

A growing number of studies suggest cultural differences in the attention and evaluation of information in adults (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Hedden, Ketay, Aron, Markus, & Gabrieli, 2008). One cultural comparison, between Westerners, such as Americans, and Easterners, such as the Japanese, suggest that Westerners typically focus on a central single object in a scene while Easterners often integrate their judgment of the focal object with surrounding contextual cues. There are few studies of whether such cultural differences are evident in children. This study examined 48 monolingual Japanese-speaking children residing in Japan and 48 monolingual English-speaking children residing in the U.S.A. (40 to 60 month-olds) in a task asking children to complete a picture by adding the proper emotional expression to a face. The key variable was the context and shift in context from the preceding trial for the same pictured individual. Japanese children were much more likely to shift their judgments with changes in context whereas children from the United States treated facial expression in a more trait-like manner, maintaining the same expression for the individual across contexts.     

Lighting position and judgments of distance of shadow-casting objects.

Participants recruited on the web performed in two experiments in which they viewed eight pictures of the same two rods in the exact same positions with shadows generated by a light source located at eight positions around the rods. In Exp. 1, participants judged how much shadows projected to the front, back, and sides of the rods facilitated the correct perception of the actual distance of the rods relative to each other. In Exp. 1 (n: 52), frontal lighting facilitated judgments more than lighting from the rear, but frontal and side lighting did not differ in facilitative effects. In Exp. 2 (n: 72), judgments of rods depicted with shadows were relative to a judgment of the rods depicted without shadows (raw scores were the value of the judgment of the shadowless rods subtracted from the value of the judgment of each of the eight sets of rods). Again, frontal lighting was more facilitative than rear lighting and frontal lighting did not differ from side lighting. However, when the average of each participant's backlighting judgments was compared with his judgment of the shadowless rods, shadows generated by backlighting were more facilitative than none.     

Sensitivity to viewpoint in children's drawings of objects and relations between objects.

Previous literature suggests that young children are relatively insensitive to viewpoint, only showing their view when the task is manipulated to provoke it. In contrast, older children appear to become more sensitive to viewpoint and it has been claimed that there is a developmental progression toward use of linear perspective as a means of drawing a view-specific scene. This study investigates sensitivity to viewpoint by manipulating it directly. Children between the ages of 6 and 14 years were asked to draw an L-shaped array of three cubes from one of three views: frontal eye level, frontal looking down, and corner looking down. At every age children showed sensitivity to their view in the sense that there were consistent differences between the drawings produced in the three viewing conditions. In the case of younger children this did not lead to an accurate portrayal of either their view or the array relations. Older children portrayed their view and the array relations more accurately, and viewpoint had a strong effect on the choice of projection system both within and between objects. There was no evidence of a general progression toward use of linear perspective.     

Multiple labels for objects in conversations with young children: parents' language and children's developing expectations about word meanings

Children sometimes seem to expect words to have mutually exclusive meanings in certain contexts of early word learning. In 2 studies, 12- to 24-month-old children and their parents were videotaped as they engaged in conversations while playing with sets of toys (sea creatures, vehicles, doll clothing) in free-play, storytelling, and categorization contexts. In both studies, parents demonstrated a reliable preference to provide just 1 label for a given object. Importantly, parents' violations of this preference were usually accompanied by clarifying (or "bridging") information that either indicated the relation between the 2 labels or suggested that 1 of the labels was appropriate. Further, in some contexts, parents' tendency to use multiple labels and to provide bridging information for multiple labels was correlated with children's productive vocabulary. It is argued that these findings support a socio-pragmatic hypothesis about the origins of children's early beliefs about word meanings.