Do reflection prompts promote children's conflict monitoring and revision of misconceptions?

We tested whether reflection prompts enhance conflict monitoring and facilitate the revision of misconceptions. German children (N = 97, Mage = 7.20, 56% female) were assigned to a prediction or a prediction with reflection condition that included reflection prompts. Children in the prediction with reflection condition (1) showed greater error-related response times and pupil dilation responses, indicating better conflict monitoring, and (2) performed closer to an optimal Bayesian learner, indicating better monitoring-based control. However, by the end of the study, all children had similar levels of misconception revision. Thus, reflection prompts can enhance learning from anomalous evidence by improving conflict monitoring, but they may need to be repeated often to sustain their beneficial effects.

Thought Experiments as an Error Detection and Correction Tool.

The ability to recognize and correct errors in one's explanatory understanding is critically important for learning. However, little is known about the mechanisms that determine when and under what circumstances errors are detected and how they are corrected. The present study investigated thought experiments as a potential tool that can reveal errors and trigger belief revision in the service of error correction. Across two experiments, 1149 participants engaged in reasoning about force and motion (a domain with well-documented misconceptions) in a pre-training-training-post-training design. The two experiments manipulated the type of mental model manipulated in the thought experiments (i.e., whether participants reasoned about forces acting on their own bodies vs. on external objects), as well as the level of relational and argumentative reasoning about the outcomes of the thought experiments. The results showed that: (i) thought experiments can serve as a tool to elicit inconsistencies in one's representations; (ii) the level of relational and argumentative reasoning determines the level of belief revision in the service of error correction; and (iii) the type of mental model manipulated in a thought experiment determines its outcome and its potential to initiate belief revision. Thought experiments can serve as a valuable teaching and learning tool, and they can help us better understand the nature of error detection and correction systems.

Talk of the Town mobile app platform: New method for engaging family in STEM learning and research in homes and communities.

Children do not just learn in the classroom. They engage in "informal learning" every day just by spending time with their family and peers. However, while researchers know this occurs, less is known about the science of this learning-how this learning works. This is so because investigators lack access to those moments of informal learning. In this mini-review we present a technical solution: a mobile-based research platform called "Talk of the Town" that will provide a window into children's informal learning. The tool will be open to all researchers and educators and is flexibly adaptable to these needs. It allows access to data that have never been studied before, providing a means for developing and testing vast educational interventions, and providing access to much more diverse samples than are typically studied in laboratories, homes, and science museums. The review details the promise and challenges associated with these new methods of data collection and family engagement in STEM learning sciences.

Seeing the Error in My "Bayes": A Quantified Degree of Belief Change Correlates with Children's Pupillary Surprise Responses Following Explicit Predictions.

Bayesian models allow us to investigate children's belief revision alongside physiological states, such as "surprise". Recent work finds that pupil dilation (or the "pupillary surprise response") following expectancy violations is predictive of belief revision. How can probabilistic models inform the interpretations of "surprise"? Shannon Information considers the likelihood of an observed event, given prior beliefs, and suggests stronger surprise occurs following unlikely events. In contrast, Kullback-Leibler divergence considers the dissimilarity between prior beliefs and updated beliefs following observations-with greater surprise indicating more change between belief states to accommodate information. To assess these accounts under different learning contexts, we use Bayesian models that compare these computational measures of "surprise" to contexts where children are asked to either predict or evaluate the same evidence during a water displacement task. We find correlations between the computed Kullback-Leibler divergence and the children's pupillometric responses only when the children actively make predictions, and no correlation between Shannon Information and pupillometry. This suggests that when children attend to their beliefs and make predictions, pupillary responses may signal the degree of divergence between a child's current beliefs and the updated, more accommodating beliefs.

Specifying the domain-general resources that contribute to conceptual construction: Evidence from the child's acquisition of vitalist biology.

There are two dissociable processes that underlie knowledge acquisition: knowledge enrichment, which involves learning information that can be represented with one's current conceptual repertoire; and conceptual construction, which involves acquiring knowledge that can only be represented in terms of concepts one does not yet possess. Theory changes involving conceptual change require conceptual construction. The cognitive mechanisms underlying conceptual change are still poorly understood, though executive function capacities have been implicated. The present study concerns the domain-general resources drawn upon in one well-studied case of the construction of a new framework theory in early childhood: the framework theory of vitalist biology, the ontogenetically earliest theory in which the concepts life and death come to have biological content shared with adults. Eighty-three five- and six-year-old children were tested on a battery of tasks that probe central concepts of the vitalist theory, as well as on a battery of tests of domain-general capacities that may be implicated in development in this domain, including measures of knowledge enrichment, executive function, and fluid IQ. With variance in accumulated knowledge and in knowledge enrichment capacity controlled, two specific executive functions, shifting and inhibition, predicted children's progress in constructing the vitalist theory. In contrast, working memory and fluid IQ were not associated with the acquisition of vitalist biology. These results provide further evidence for the distinction between knowledge enrichment and conceptual construction and impose new constraints on accounts of the mechanisms underlying conceptual construction in this domain.

The role of domain-general cognitive resources in children's construction of a vitalist theory of biology.

Some episodes of learning are easier than others. Preschoolers can learn certain facts, such as "my grandmother gave me this purse," only after one or two exposures (easy to learn; fast mapping), but they require several years to learn that plants are alive or that the sun is not alive (hard to learn). One difference between the two kinds of knowledge acquisition is that hard cases often require conceptual construction, such as the construction of the biological concept alive, whereas easy cases merely involve forming new beliefs formulated over concepts the child already has (belief revision, a form of knowledge enrichment). We asked whether different domain-general cognitive resources support these two types of knowledge acquisition (conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment that supports fast mapping) by testing 82 6-year-olds in a pre-training/training/post-training study. We measured children's improvement in an episode involving theory construction (the beginning steps of acquisition of the framework theory of vitalist biology, which requires conceptual change) and in an episode involving knowledge enrichment alone (acquisition of little known facts about animals, such as the location of crickets' ears and the color of octopus blood). In addition, we measured children's executive functions and receptive vocabulary to directly compare the resources drawn upon in the two episodes of learning. We replicated and extended previous findings highlighting the differences between conceptual construction and knowledge enrichment, and we found that Executive Functions predict improvement on the Vitalism battery but not on the Fun Facts battery and that Receptive Vocabulary predicts improvement the Fun Facts battery but not on the Vitalism battery. This double dissociation provides new evidence for the distinction between the two types of knowledge acquisition, and bears on the nature of the learning mechanisms involved in each.

Some consequences of normal aging for generating conceptual explanations: A case study of vitalist biology.

Accumulating evidence suggests that not only diseases of old age, but also normal aging, affect elderly adults' ability to draw on the framework theories that structure our abstract causal-explanatory knowledge, knowledge that we use to make sense of the world. One such framework theory, the cross-culturally universal vitalist biology, gives meaning to the abstract concepts life and death. Previous work shows that many elderly adults are animists, claiming that active, moving entities such as the sun and the wind are alive (Zaitchik & Solomon, 2008). Such responses are characteristic of young children, who, lacking an intuitive theory of biology, distinguish animals from non-animals on the basis of a theory of causal and intentional agency. What explains such childlike responses? Do the elderly undergo semantic degradation of their intuitive biological theory? Or do they merely have difficulty deploying their theory of biology in the face of interference from the developmentally prior agency theory? Here we develop an analytic strategy to answer this question. Using a battery of vitalist biology tasks, this study demonstrates-for the first time-that animism in the elderly is due to difficulty in deployment of the vitalist theory, not its degradation. We additionally establish some powerful downstream consequences of theory deployment difficulties, demonstrating that the elderly's use of the agency theory is not restricted to animist judgments-rather, it pervades their explicit reasoning about animates and inanimates. Extending the investigation, we identify specific cognitive mechanisms implicated in adult animism, finding that differences between young and elderly adults are mediated and moderated by differences in inhibition and shifting mechanisms. The analytic strategy developed here could help adjudicate between degradation and deployment in other conceptual domains and other populations.

The beautiful and the accurate: Are children's selective trust decisions biased?

Recent findings imply that children rationally appraise potential informants; they weigh an informant's past accuracy more heavily than other informant-based cues such as accent, age, and familiarity. Yet this conclusion contrasts with the more general conclusion that deliberate decision-making processes are heavily influenced by perceptual biases. We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' (N=132) decisions about whether to trust a more versus less attractive informant when (a) both had a similar history of past accuracy or (b) the more attractive informant had been less accurate. Similarly, we investigated their decisions about whether to trust a more versus less accurate informant when (a) both were similarly attractive or (b) the more accurate informant was less attractive. Despite their sensitivity to past accuracy, children's selective trust was clearly biased by the informant's attractiveness. Relationships to previous findings and future implications are discussed.

In beauty we trust: children prefer information from more attractive informants.

Preschool children were presented with slides on a computer screen showing a novel object, together with two informants, one with an attractive and one with a less attractive face. Children were asked which informant they would like to ask about the name of the novel object. After hearing the informants provide conflicting names, they were asked who they thought was correct. Children were more likely to endorse names provided by the person with the more attractive face, a bias that cannot be justified on epistemic grounds. The implications of this finding are discussed.

Gravity is not the only ruler for falling events: Young children stop making the gravity error after receiving additional perceptual information about the tubes mechanism.

Young children seem to operate under the assumption that objects always fall in a straight vertical line. When asked to search for a ball dropped down an S-shaped opaque tube, they repeatedly search directly below. Hood proposed that children have difficulty in inhibiting their prepotent expectation that objects fall in a straight line (Hood, 1995). We asked whether the inability to inhibit this prepotent response is the only factor determining children's performance on the tubes task. In one condition the openings to the tubes were covered by chimneys, whereas in another condition the openings were visible. When first tested with the apparatus, children performed better when the openings were visible. Furthermore, children's performance on equally complex configurations (i.e., with or without chimneys) was modulated by their previous experience. Thus, children's understanding of the tubes mechanism seems to play an important role in addition to inhibitory control.