Promoting scientific understanding and conceptual change in young children using explanations and guidance.

Evaluating evidence and restructuring beliefs based on anomalous evidence are fundamental aspects of scientific reasoning. These skills can be challenging for both children and adults, especially in domains where they possess inaccurate prior beliefs that can interfere with the acquisition of correct scientific information (e.g.

Children's hypothetical reasoning about complex and dynamic systems.

Children's hypothetical reasoning about a complex and dynamic causal system was investigated. Predominantly White, middle-class 5- to 7-year-old children from the Greater Toronto Area learned about novel food chains and were asked to consider the effects of removing one species on the others. In Study 1 (N = 72; 36 females, 36 males; 2018), 7-year-olds answered questions about both direct and indirect effects with a high degree of accuracy, whereas 5-year-olds performed at chance.

Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny.

Humans possess the remarkable capacity to imagine possible worlds and to demarcate possibilities and impossibilities in reasoning. We can think about what might happen in the future and consider what the present would look like had the past turned out differently. We reason about cause and effect, weigh up alternative courses of action and regret our mistakes.

Language as a mechanism for reasoning about possibilities.

The ability to entertain and reflect on possibilities is a crucial component of human reasoning. However, the origin of this reasoning-whether it is language-based or not-is highly debated. We contribute to this debate by investigating the relation between language and thought in the domain of possibility from a developmental perspective.

Linking early maternal input during shared reading to later theory of mind through receptive language and executive function: A within- and between-family design.

This study explored whether early maternal input during shared reading predicted later theory of mind (ToM) understanding through children's receptive language and executive function (EF). Maternal input plays a prominent role in the development of children's language skills, which are crucial for both EF and ToM development. There is also an abundance of behavioral evidence suggesting a directional link from EF to ToM.

Learning science concepts through prompts to consider alternative possible worlds.

We investigated whether prompting children to think counterfactually when learning a complex science concept (planetary habitability) would promote their learning and transfer. In Study 1, children (N = 102 6- and 7-year-olds) were either prompted to think counterfactually about Earth (e.g.

Children's and adults' use of fictional discourse and semantic knowledge for prediction in language processing.

Using real-time eye-movement measures, we asked how a fantastical discourse context competes with stored representations of real-world events to influence the moment-by-moment interpretation of a story by 7-year-old children and adults. Seven-year-olds were less effective at bypassing stored real-world knowledge during real-time interpretation than adults. Our results suggest that children privilege stored semantic knowledge over situation-specific information presented in a fictional story context.

Scientific reasoning and counterfactual reasoning in development.

In this chapter, we bridge research on scientific and counterfactual reasoning. We review findings that children struggle with many aspects of scientific experimentation in the absence of formal instruction, but show sophistication in the ability to reason about counterfactual possibilities. We connect these two sets of findings by reviewing relevant theories on the relation between causal, scientific, and counterfactual reasoning before describing a growing body of work that indicates that prompting children to consider counterfactual alternatives can scaffold both the scientific inquiry process (hypothesis-testing and evidence evaluation) and science concept learning.

Learning to learn from video? 30-month-olds benefit from continued use of supportive scaffolding.

Young children struggle to learn new words presented on video, but adult co-viewers can support them by providing scaffolds that explicitly connect the video and real world. In this study, we asked whether scaffolding facilitates children's symbolic understanding of the video, such that they will subsequently transfer labels from video to real referents. Sixty-three 30-month-olds and 61 36-month-olds participated in a series of three word learning trials in one of three conditions.

The Role of Alternative Theories and Anomalous Evidence in Children's Scientific Belief Revision.

Children's naive theories include misconceptions which can interfere with science learning. This research examined the effect of pairing anomalies with alternative theories, and their order of presentation, on children's belief revision. Children believe that heavy objects sink and light ones float.

The effect of object similarity and alignment of examples on children's learning and transfer from picture books.

Story picture books with examples can be used to teach young children science concepts. Learners can abstract relational information by comparing the analogical examples in the books, leading to a more abstract transferrable understanding of the concept. The purpose of this study was to determine whether manipulating the content or arrangement of the examples included in a picture book would support children's generalization and transfer of a relational concept, namely color camouflage.

Prompting Children's Belief Revision About Balance Through Primary and Secondary Sources of Evidence.

Prior evidence has shown that children's understanding of balance proceeds through stages. Children go from a stage where they lack a consistent theory (), to becoming at around age 6 (believing that all objects balance in their geometric center), to at around age 8, when they begin to consider the distribution of objects' mass. In this study we adapted prior testing paradigms to examine 5-year-olds' understanding of balance and compared children's learning about balance from evidence presented through primary sources (a guided activity) or secondary sources (picture books).

Variability in toddlers' ability to verbally update their mental representations of absent objects.

Early in development children rely on other people's verbal testimony to acquire information about things that are not available to their immediate perception. There is evidence that children as young as 22 months can use language to learn about an object that undergoes a property change (e.g.

What is and what never should have been: Children's causal and counterfactual judgments about the same events.

Substantial research with adults has characterized the contents of individuals' counterfactual thoughts. In contrast, little is known about the types of events children invoke in their counterfactual thoughts and how they compare with their causal ascriptions. In the current study, we asked children open-ended counterfactual and causal questions about events in which a character's action enabled a force of nature to cause a minor mishap.

Toddlers' understanding and use of verbal negation in inferential reasoning search tasks.

Past research has demonstrated that young children and nonhuman animals are able to reason by elimination ("If not A, then B") by relying on visual cues such as seeing that one container is empty. Other research has shown that young children can solve similar, simple inferential reasoning tasks where "emptiness" is conveyed verbally through negation (e.g.

Mature counterfactual reasoning in 4- and 5-year-olds.

Counterfactual reasoning is a hallmark of the human imagination. Recently, researchers have argued that children do not display genuine counterfactual reasoning until they can reason about events that are overdetermined and consider the removal of one of multiple causes that lead to the same outcome. This ability has been shown to emerge between 6 and 12 years of age.

Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder Can Use Language to Update Their Expectations About the World.

This study examined if two-year-olds with ASD can update mental representations on the basis of verbal input. In an eye-tracking study, toddlers with ASD and typically-developing nonverbal age-matched controls were exposed to visual or verbal information about a change in a recently encoded scene, followed by an outcome that was either congruent or incongruent with that information. Findings revealed that both groups looked longer at incongruent outcomes, regardless of information modality, and despite the fact that toddlers with ASD had significantly lower measured verbal abilities than TD toddlers.

The Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts.

Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world.

Children's Counterfactual Reasoning About Causally Overdetermined Events.

In two experiments, one hundred and sixty-two 6- to 8-year-olds were asked to reason counterfactually about events with different causal structures. All events involved overdetermined outcomes in which two different causal events led to the same outcome. In Experiment 1, children heard stories with either an ambiguous causal relation between events or causally unrelated events.

Do storybooks with anthropomorphized animal characters promote prosocial behaviors in young children?

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and thus are more inclined to act according to the moral lessons of the stories. Here we experimentally tested this belief by reading preschoolers a sharing story with either human characters or anthropomorphized animal characters.

Parent-Toddler Behavior and Language Differ When Reading Electronic and Print Picture Books.

Little is known about the language and behaviors that typically occur when adults read electronic books with infants and toddlers, and which are supportive of learning. In this study, we report differences in parent and child behavior and language when reading print versus electronic versions of the same books, and investigate links between behavior and vocabulary learning. Parents of 102 toddlers aged 17-26 months were randomly assigned to read two commercially available electronic books or two print format books with identical content with their toddler.

Toddlers' word learning and transfer from electronic and print books.

Transfer from symbolic media to the real world can be difficult for young children. A sample of 73 toddlers aged 17 to 23months were read either an electronic book displayed on a touchscreen device or a traditional print book in which a novel object was paired with a novel label. Toddlers in both conditions learned the label within the context of the book.

Out of Reach, Out of Mind? Infants' Comprehension of References to Hidden Inaccessible Objects.

This study investigated the nature of infants' difficulty understanding references to hidden inaccessible objects. Twelve-month-old infants (N = 32) responded to the mention of objects by looking at, pointing at, or approaching them when the referents were visible or accessible, but not when they were hidden and inaccessible (Experiment I). Twelve-month-olds (N = 16) responded robustly when a container with the hidden referent was moved from a previously inaccessible position to an accessible position before the request, but failed to respond when the reverse occurred (Experiment II).

Sixteen-month-olds can use language to update their expectations about the visual world.

The capacity to use language to form new representations and to revise existing knowledge is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Here we examined whether infants can use language to adjust their representation of a recently encoded scene. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we asked whether 16-month-old infants (N=26; mean age=16;0 [months;days], range=14;15-17;15) can use language about an occluded event to inform their expectation about what the world will look like when the occluder is removed.

Learning to learn from stories: children's developing sensitivity to the causal structure of fictional worlds.

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened to stories in which a novel causal relation was embedded within realistic or fantastical contexts.