Young Children's Knowledge about Thinking

Flavell, John H.; Green, Frances L.; Flavell, Eleanor R.

doi:10.2307/1166124

Cited by 286 publications

(135 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Researchers have proposed that children have such theories at many different levels of abstraction, ranging from broad, framework theories of naïve physics, naïve psychology, and naïve biology [14,[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] to quite local causal beliefs (e.g., about the relationship between balance and mass [25], density and floating [26], and ball properties and tennis serves [27]). At every level of abstraction, these prior beliefs affect learners' judgments about statistical evidence [28][29][30][31].…”

Section: Core Epistemic Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood

Schulz

2012

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

159

147

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Section: Core Epistemic Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood

Schulz

2012

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

159

147

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Executive control is related to other cognitive differences between children and adults, such as the ability to use metacognitive strategies (e.g., Flavell et al, 1995). It may be that adults' ability to introspect and reason about their own cognition makes them more likely to rely on explicit rather than implicit learning (Ullman, 2004) -a difference that has been hypothesized to be the root of child-adult differences in language acquisition.…”

Section: Bringing It All Togethermentioning

confidence: 99%

When do memory limitations lead to regularization? An experimental and computational investigation

Perfors

2012

Journal of Memory and Language

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Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution's repository, e-mailing to colleagues. However, our policies differ regarding the systematic aggregation or distribution of AAMs to ensure the sustainability of the journals to which AAMs are submitted. Therefore, deposit in, or posting to, subject-oriented or centralized repositories (such as PubMed Central), or institutional repositories with systematic posting mandates is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository, agency or institution, and only consistent with the publisher's policies concerning such repositories. Voluntary posting of AAMs in the arXiv subject repository is permitted. nd April 2013When do memory limitations lead to regularization? An experimental and computational investigation Amy PerforsSchool of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia AbstractThe Less is More hypothesis suggests that one reason adults and children differ in their ability to learn language is that they also differ in other cognitive capacities. According to one version of this hypothesis, children's relatively poor memory may make them more likely to regularize inconsistent input Newport, 2005, 2009). This paper reports the result of an experimental and computational investigation of one aspect of this version of the hypothesis.A series of seven experiments in which adults were placed under a high cognitive load during a language-learning task reveal that in adults, increased load during learning (as opposed to retrieval) does not result in increased regularization. A computational model offers a possible explanation for these results. It demonstrates that, unless memory limitations distort the data in a particular way, regularization should occur only in the presence of both memory limitations and a prior bias for regularization. Taken together, these findings suggest that the difference in regularization between adults and children may not be solely attributable to differences in memory limitations during learning.

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“…Recent research suggests that very young children know much more about the causal structure of the world than Piaget believed (Baillargeon, Kotovsky, & Needham, 1995;Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1995;Gelman & Wellman, 1991;Kalish, 1996;Leslie & Keeble, 1987;Saxe, Tenenbaum, & Carey, 2005;Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992). However, the idea at the heart of the Piagetian account --that children "construct" knowledge (and particularly causal knowledge) by active exploration --remains widely accepted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded

Schulz¹,

Bonawitz²

2018

Preprint

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Researchers, educators, and parents have long believed that children learn cause and effect relationships through exploratory play. However, previous research suggests that children are poor at designing informative experiments; children fail to control relevant variables and tend to alter multiple variables simultaneously. Thus, little is known about how children's spontaneous exploration might support accurate causal inferences. Here we suggest that children's exploratory play is affected by the quality of the evidence they observe. Using a novel free-play paradigm, we show that preschoolers (mean age: 57 months) distinguish confounded and unconfounded evidence, preferentially explore causally confounded (but not matched unconfounded) toys rather than novel toys, and spontaneously disambiguate confounded variables in the course of free play.KEWORDS: causal learning, exploratory play, preschoolers' scientific reasoning, ambiguous evidence, confounded variables CONFOUNDING AND PLAY 3 Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded Causal knowledge is fundamental to our understanding of the world. It informs our moral judgments, our explanations of the past, and our plans for the future. Little wonder that Hume called causal knowledge the "cement of the universe" (1740/2000). However, relatively little is known about how children learn the causal structure of events.Piaget believed that young children came to understand causal relationships through active exploration of their environment (1930). Recent research suggests that very young children know much more about the causal structure of the world than Piaget believed (Baillargeon, Kotovsky, & Needham, 1995;Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1995;Gelman & Wellman, 1991;Kalish, 1996;Leslie & Keeble, 1987;Saxe, Tenenbaum, & Carey, 2005;Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992). However, the idea at the heart of the Piagetian account --that children "construct" knowledge (and particularly causal knowledge) by active exploration --remains widely accepted.Yet despite substantial agreement that children learn through play (e.g., Bruner, Jolly, & Sylva, 1976;Singer, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2006), little is known about how exploratory play might support accurate causal inferences. Descriptive studies of play are more common than experimental research or theoretical accounts, and much of the seminal work on exploratory play predates recent research on children's causal reasoning (Berlyne, 1954;Piaget, 1951). Except for the well-established finding that children (and many non-human animals) selectively explore novel stimuli (Berlyne, 1960;Dember & Earl, 1957;Henderson & Moore, 1980; Hutt & Bhaynani, 1972;Pavlov, 1927), there is CONFOUNDING AND PLAY 4 little evidence for systematic patterns in children's exploratory behavior. Moreover, considerable research suggests that even older children and naïve adults are poor at designing causally informative experiments and have difficulty anticipating the type of evidence that would s...

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Young Children's Knowledge about Thinking

Cited by 286 publications

References 54 publications

The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood

The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood

When do memory limitations lead to regularization? An experimental and computational investigation

Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded

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