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., heavier objects fall faster than light ones). Across two experiments, we examined the additive benefit of combining explanations with guided activities to promote conceptual change. In Experiment 1 (N = 238), 4- and 5-year-olds were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: guidance with explanations, guidance only, or baseline. The guided conditions varied only in the presence or absence of conceptual information (i.e., explanation about gravity). Pre- and posttest measures showed that children's predictions improved from both guided conditions compared to the baseline condition but did not significantly differ from each other. Experiment 2 (N = 80, 5-year-olds) included a delay test and assessed children's learning through the justification of their predictions. Although children's performance at the immediate posttest improved in both conditions, in the guidance only, children's performance returned to the pretest levels of understanding after the delay. Children in the guidance with explanations condition had greater understanding at posttest, retained this understanding long term, and transferred it to objects with the same weight. These findings highlight the role of explanations in aiding children's long-term learning from anomalous evidence in guided activities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

A follow up investigation of placental pathology, responsive parenting, and preschool children's executive functioning and language development.

Despite documented effects linking underlying placental diseases and neurological impairments in children, little is known about the long-term effects of placental pathology on children's neurocognitive outcomes. In addition, maternal responsivity, known to positively influence early postnatal cognitive development, may act to protect children from putative adverse effects of placental pathology. The current study is a follow up of medically healthy, term born, preschool age children, born with placental pathology. A sample of 118 children (45 comparison children with normal placental findings, 73 born with placental pathology) were followed when children were 3-4 years old. In comparison to children born to mothers with normal placentas, placental pathology was associated with poorer performance in the executive function involving cognitive flexibility, but not inhibitory control or receptive language. Maternal responsivity was observed to be marginally protective on the impact of placental pathology risk on cognitive flexibility, but this was not seen for either inhibitory control or receptive language.

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. Six-year-olds showed intermediate performance. Using food chains with clearer constraints, Study 2 (N = 72; 35 females, 37 males; 2020-2021) replicated these findings. These results indicate that the ability to think about hypothetical changes to dynamic causal systems develops between 5 and 7 years. Implications for science education are discussed.

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. Our investigation focuses on disjunctive syllogism, a specific type of possibility reasoning that has been explored extensively in the developmental literature and has clear linguistic correlates. Seeking links between conceptual and linguistic representations, we review evidence on how children reason by the disjunctive syllogism and how they acquire logical and modal language. We sketch a proposal for how language and thought interact during development. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

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. In this theme issue, leading experts from across the life sciences provide ground-breaking insights into the proximate questions of how thinking about possibilities works and develops, and the ultimate questions of its adaptive functions and evolutionary history. Together, the contributions delineate neurophysiological, cognitive and social mechanisms involved in mentally simulating possible states of reality; and point to conceptual changes in the understanding of singular and multiple possibilities during human development. The contributions also demonstrate how thinking about possibilities can augment learning, decision-making and judgement, and highlight aspects of the capacity that appear to be shared with non-human animals and aspects that may be uniquely human. Throughout the issue, it becomes clear that many developmental milestones achieved during childhood, and many of the most significant evolutionary and cultural triumphs of the human species, can only be understood with reference to increasingly complex reasoning about possibilities. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

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. This relation raises the possibility of a cognitive cascade in which maternal input during shared reading promotes ToM development sequentially through receptive language and EF. The sample included 656 children clustered within 328 ethnically and sociodemographically diverse families. The shared reading sessions occurred when the younger and older siblings were 1.5 and 4 years old, respectively. Receptive language, EF, and ToM were measured when the siblings were approximately 5 years old to account for age differences. Multilevel modeling using Bayesian estimation was used to account for the effect of family-wide confounds (i.e., shared between the siblings in the family) while isolating child-specific processes (i.e., unique to each child within the family). The results supported two indirect paths from shared reading to children's ToM: one through receptive language alone and another that operated sequentially through receptive language and EF. These paths were observed only at the family level. These findings emphasize the importance of maternal input during early shared reading for cognitive development and suggest a cascade from maternal input to ToM via language and EF during the preschool period.

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., whether it is closer to or farther from the sun) or prompted to think about examples of different planets (Venus and Neptune) during an illustrated tutorial. A control group did not receive the tutorial. Children in the counterfactual and examples groups showed better comprehension and transfer of the concept than those in the control group. Moreover, children who were prompted to think counterfactually showed some evidence of better transfer to a novel planetary system than those who were prompted to think about different examples. In Study 2, we investigated the nature of the counterfactual benefit observed in Study 1. Children (N = 70 6- and 7-year-olds) received a tutorial featuring a novel (imaginary) planet and were either prompted to think counterfactually about the planet or prompted to think about examples of additional novel planets. Performance was equivalent across conditions and was better than performance in the control condition on all measures. The results suggest that prompts to think about alternative possibilities-both in the form of counterfactuals and in the form of alternative possible worlds-are a promising pedagogical tool for promoting abstract learning of complex science concepts.

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. We suggest that 7-year-olds' canonical semantic and conceptual relations are sufficiently strongly rooted in statistical patterns in language that have consolidated over time that they overwhelm new and unexpected information even when the latter is fantastical and highly salient.

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. This work suggests that counterfactual thought experiments are a promising pedagogical tool. We end by discussing several open questions for future research.

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. In the supportive condition, an in-person adult explicitly drew connections between each on-screen object and the corresponding real object in the room with the child. In the unsupportive condition, the in-person adult provided similar-length statements about the objects but did not draw connections between them. In the partial scaffold condition, the in-person adult provided the supportive scaffolds for the first two trials and the unsupportive version for the third trial. At 30 months, children selected the correct object on the third trial more often in the supportive than the unsupportive scaffold condition, and performance in the partial scaffold condition fell in between. At 36 months, performance on the third trial did not differ across conditions. The results showed that experiencing the scaffold twice was not enough to reliably support 30-month-olds in learning to think symbolically on the third trial; rather, they appeared to rely on the adult to connect the video image with its specific real-world referent. At 36 months, however, children did not rely on the adult scaffold to apply the video label to the real-world objects.

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. In a pre-, mid-, and post-test design, 5-year-olds (N = 96) were assigned to one of two conditions, where they were either exposed to an alternative theory about buoyancy and then observed anomalies (Explanation-First), or the reverse (Anomalies-First). At mid-test, children were more likely to revise their beliefs after exposure to an alternative theory than anomalies alone. At post-test, children revised their naïve belief when they had access to an alternative theory before the anomalous evidence than in the opposite order.

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. In total, 81 3-year-olds and 80 4-year-olds were read one of four books at two visits spaced approximately 1 week apart. Examples were manipulated in a 2 (Object Similarity: high or low) × 2 (Arrangement: interleaved or blocked) design. At each visit, children were asked forced-choice questions with photographs (generalization) and real animals (transfer) and needed to explain their choices. At the first visit, only 3-year-olds who had been read a book with high object similarity displayed generalization and transfer. After they were read the same book again at the second visit, 3-year-olds in all conditions performed above chance on generalization questions but made more correct selections if they had been read the books with blocked examples. The 4-year-olds showed no book-related differences on forced-choice questions at either visit but gave better explanations at the second visit if they had been read interleaved books. Our study provides evidence that picture books with analogical examples can be used to teach children about science but that different types and arrangements of examples may better support children at different ages and with different amounts of prior experience.

Designing Narrative-Focused Role-Playing Games for Visualization Literacy in Young Children.

Building on game design and education research, this paper introduces narrative-focused role-playing games as a way to promote visualization literacy in young children. Visualization literacy skills are vital in understanding the world around us and constructing meaningful visualizations, yet, how to better develop these skills at an early age remains largely overlooked and understudied. Only recently has the visualization community started to fill this gap, resulting in preliminary studies and development of educational tools for use in early education. We add to these efforts through the exploration of gamification to support learning, and identify an opportunity to apply role-playing game-based designs by leveraging the presence of narratives in data-related problems involving visualizations. We study the effects of including narrative elements on learning through a technology probe, grounded in a set of design considerations stemming from visualization, game design and education science. We create two versions of a game - one with narrative elements and one without - and evaluate our instances on 33 child participants between 11- to 13-years old using a between-subjects study design. Despite participants requiring double the amount of time to complete their game due to additional narrative elements, the inclusion of such elements were found to improve engagement without sacrificing learning; our results indicate no significant differences in development of graph-reading skills, but significant differences in engagement and overall enjoyment of the game. We report observations and qualitative feedback collected, and note areas for improvement and room for future work.

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 (No Theory), to becoming Center Theorists at around age 6 (believing that all objects balance in their geometric center), to Mass Theorists 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). Most of the research on young children's understanding of balance has been conducted using a single object, weighted either proportionally (symmetrical object) or disproportionally (asymmetrical object). In this study, instead of using a single object, 5-year-olds (N = 102) were shown 4 pairs of objects, two with the same weight and two with different weight. Children were told to place the objects on a beam where they thought they would balance. We found evidence for an intermediate level of understanding. Transition Theorists represent children who have two distinct theories, one for balancing same weight objects, and one for balancing different weight objects, but one of these theories is incorrect. Following the assessment of children's understanding, we compared their learning about balance from evidence that was either presented through primary sources (a guided activity) or secondary sources (picture books). Children learn equally well from both sources of evidence. Findings are discussed in terms of theoretical and practical implications.

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., "Lucy got wet") out of their sight. If the verbal input conveys a change in the location of an absent object (e.g., "The puppy is moved from the bag to the box"), 30-month-olds successfully use this information and find the object in its new location, whereas the majority of 23-month-olds perseverate to the object's initial location. These findings suggest that young children's ability to use verbal testimony to update their mental representations of absent entities shows variability within and across tasks. The goal of the current research was to replicate the pattern of performance observed in previous cross-sectional studies within the same group of children. A total of 59 2-year-olds (Mage = 26.9 months, range = 21.4-34.5) were administered two versions of verbal updating tasks: property and location change. As a group, children showed more variable performance when they learned about a change in an object's location (58% success) than when they learned about a change in its property (75% success). Moreover, comparison of individual children's performance across the two tasks revealed that at this age children found the location change harder to update than the property change. We discuss possible explanations for children's differential performance on verbal updating tasks involving property and location change.

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. Children aged 3.5-8 years (N = 160) tended to invoke characters' actions in their counterfactual judgments to explain how an event could have been prevented (e.g., "She should have closed the window") and tended to invoke forces of nature in their causal judgments (e.g., "The rain got it wet"). Younger children were also significantly more likely than older children to invoke forces of nature in their counterfactuals (e.g., "It shouldn't have rained"). These results indicate that, similar to reasoning patterns found in adults, children tend to focus on controllable enabling conditions when reasoning counterfactually, but the results also point to some developmental differences. The developmental similarities suggest that counterfactual reasoning may serve a similar function from middle childhood through adulthood.

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., "The toy is not in the box"). However, it is unclear whether these tasks involved reasoning through the disjunctive syllogism, which requires the representation of logical negation (NOT A) and disjunction (A OR B) or simpler, nondeductive strategies. In Study 1, we extended this work by investigating whether 2-year-olds can infer the location of a toy in typical two-location elimination trials, when given both affirmative and negative sentences, and more complex three-location trials, when information about emptiness was conveyed verbally and visually. Younger 2-year-olds performed significantly better on the search task when hearing affirmative than negative sentences, whereas older 2-year-olds were equally successful with both types of sentences. Study 2 examined children's ability to use verbal negation to solve a more complex deductive task involving disjunctive syllogism. Results showed that, in this linguistic version of the disjunctive reasoning task, both 2.5- and 3-year-olds made accurate inferences about the location of a reward, unlike prior (nonlinguistic) evidence that demonstrated this ability in 3-year-olds but not in younger children. We conclude that by the end of their second year of life, children have a robust understanding of negation which they can apply in abstract reasoning.

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. Children in the causally unrelated version performed better than chance and better than those in the ambiguous condition. In Experiment 2, children heard stories in which antecedent events were causally connected or causally disconnected. Eight-year-olds performed above chance in both conditions, whereas 6-year-olds performed above chance only in the connected condition. This work provides the first evidence that children can reason counterfactually in causally overdetermined contexts by age 8.

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. This demonstrates that, although there is heterogeneity on the individual level, young toddlers with ASD can succeed in updating their mental representations on the basis of verbal input in a low-demand task.

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. In 3 experiments, we used an overdetermined physical causation task to investigate preschoolers' ability to reason counterfactually. In Experiment 1a, preschoolers (N = 96) were presented with a "blicket-detector" machine. Children saw both overdetermined (2 causal blocks on a box) and single-cause trials (1 causal and 1 non-causal block) and were asked what would have happened if one of the two blocks had not been placed on the box. Four-year-olds' performance was above chance on both trial types, and 5-year-olds' performance was at ceiling, whereas 3-year-olds did not perform above chance on any trial types. These findings were replicated in Experiment 1b with 4- and 5-year-olds (N = 40) using more complex question wording. In Experiment 2 (N = 40, 4- and 5-year-olds), we introduced a temporal delay between the placement of the first and second block to test the robustness of children's counterfactual reasoning. Even on this more difficult version of the task, performance was significantly above chance. Given a clear and novel causal structure, preschoolers display adult-like counterfactual reasoning.