Children's Judgments Research Articles

Do children estimate area using an "Additive-Area Heuristic"?

A large and growing body of work has documented robust illusions of area perception in adults. To date, however, there has been surprisingly little in-depth investigation into children's area perception, despite the importance of this topic to the study of quantity perception more broadly (and to the many studies that have been devoted to studying children's number perception). Here, in order to understand the interactions of number and area on quantity perception, we study both dimensions in tandem. This work is inspired by recent studies showing that human adults estimate area via an "Additive Area Heuristic," whereby the horizontal and vertical dimensions are summed rather than multiplied. First, we test whether children may rely on this same kind of heuristic. Indeed, "additive area" explains children's area judgments better than true, mathematical area. Second, we show that children's use of "additive area" biases number judgments. Finally, to isolate "additive area" from number, we test children's area perception in a task where number is held constant across all trials. We find something surprising: even when there is no overall effect of "additive area" or "mathematical area," individual children adopt and stick to specific strategies throughout the task. In other words, some children appear to rely on "additive area," while others appear to rely on true, mathematical area - a pattern of results that may be best explained by a misunderstanding about the concept of cumulative area. We discuss how these findings raise both theoretical and practical challenges of studying quantity perception in young children.

Cooperative Games and Prosocial Reasoning in Children: Effects of an Intervention Program

This article presents the results of a study made with children between seven and eight years of age, with the purpose of determining the influence of cooperative on their prosocial judgment. It has a quasi-experimental design with control and experimental groups, with pre-test and post-test measurements through a pictorical scale to evaluate prosocial reasoning in the participating children, before and after the implementation of an intervention program based on cooperative games. The program had a significant impact on children's prosocial judgment, there was an increase in the frequency of children with needs-oriented and stereotyped reasoning, and a decrease in hedonistic judgment. Psychoeducational programs of this type could be used to positively influence the reasoning and prosocial behavior of children at these ages.

Socioeconomic status predicts children's moral judgments of novel resource distributions.

Children's moral judgments of resource distributions as having "fair" or "unfair" origins play an important role in early social cognition. What factors shape these judgments? The present study advances research on this question in two primary ways: First, while prior work has typically assigned children to an advantaged or disadvantaged position in an experimental setting, here we also investigated how relative objective and Subjective Socioeconomic Status (OSS and SSS) predicted children's judgments. Second, while prior work has asked children to judge distributions with known origins, here we presented children with novel and causally ambiguous distributions, thereby simulating children's initial encounter of resource distributions in the social world. We assessed participants' (n=113, 6- to 9-year-olds) OSS and SSS and then introduced them to a machine that distributed Skittles on an unknown basis. Participants received half as many, twice as many, or the same number of Skittles as a peer in three between-subjects conditions, and then rated the machine's fairness. Results revealed that children who rated their families as wealthier relative to their neighborhoods (higher SSS) rated the machine as more fair. However, children from families that were actually wealthier relative to their neighborhoods (higher OSS) were more likely to rate the disadvantage-giving machine as unfair. Together, results represent the first evidence that OSS and SSS shape children's moral judgments of resource distributions, consistent with evidence that these two forms of socioeconomic status have unique impacts on adults' judgments of inequality. Implications for moral and social development are discussed.

Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K'iche'.

How do language learners avoid the production of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors ( *The clown laughed the man c.f. The clown made the man laugh), while retaining the ability to apply such generalizations productively when appropriate? This question has long been seen as one that is both particularly central to acquisition research and particularly challenging. Focussing on causative overgeneralization errors of this type, a previous study reported a computational model that learns, on the basis of corpus data and human-derived verb-semantic-feature ratings, to predict adults' by-verb preferences for less- versus more-transparent causative forms (e.g., * The clown laughed the man vs The clown made the man laugh) across English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K'iche Mayan. Here, we tested the ability of this model (and an expanded version with multiple hidden layers) to explain binary grammaticality judgment data from children aged 4;0-5;0, and elicited-production data from children aged 4;0-5;0 and 5;6-6;6 ( N=48 per language). In general, the model successfully simulated both children's judgment and production data, with correlations of r=0.5-0.6 and r=0.75-0.85, respectively, and also generalized to unseen verbs. Importantly, learners of all five languages showed some evidence of making the types of overgeneralization errors - in both judgments and production - previously observed in naturalistic studies of English (e.g., *I'm dancing it). Together with previous findings, the present study demonstrates that a simple learning model can explain (a) adults' continuous judgment data, (b) children's binary judgment data and (c) children's production data (with no training of these datasets), and therefore constitutes a plausible mechanistic account of the acquisition of verbs' argument structure restrictions.

Отношения поколений: представления современного ребенка младшего школьного возраста

The work is aimed at studying the current attitude towards the ageing person by the generation of “digital childhood” in comparison with the expectations of representatives of the late-age generation. We assumed that, against the background of modern transformations of intergenerational traditions, we can expect descendants to recognize the preservation of the standard of ancestral behavior. 284 residents of Petropavlovsk- Kamchatsky were surveyed: 40 respondents from 57 to 80 years old and 122 child-parent dyads (children from 8,2 to 9.6 years old, parents from 27 to 61 years old). At the first stage, data were obtained from parents using the author's questionnaire allowing them to present their opinion about the real state of the relationship between children and their grandparents and the importance of (non-)participation of grandparents in the upbringing of their grandchildren. At the second stage, the analysis of the interviews in the focus groups of schoolchildren and a gerontological sample concretized attitudes towards a person of senior age and allowed independent experts to identify relevant categories (based on content analysis). At the third stage, options for reflecting the (non-)consent of the older generation with children's judgments were investigated. The results were evaluated on the Likert scale. It is shown that, despite the significant choice of children's attitude as condescending compassion, in the range of consent of the expected attitude, children's variants of continuity of preserving the experience of obligatory and valuable behavior of the grandparents are presented. The data obtained emphasize the problem of recognizing the uniqueness of the experience of each generational group as a source of generational solidarity and the basis of cultural adaptation to age.

Associations among child temperament, parenting, and young children's moral and conventional understanding: The moderating role of self‐regulation

AbstractThe current study examined the role of child temperament, parenting, and their interactions in 2‐ to 6‐year‐olds’ (n = 112; Mage = 3.82 years, SD = 1.01) moral and social‐conventional understanding. Children's judgments regarding hypothetical moral and conventional transgressions were assessed in a semi‐structured interview administered on an iPad. Parents reported on their child's temperamental self‐regulation (i.e., effortful control) and negative affect, as well as their own parenting practices (hostility and positive affect); children's self‐regulatory behavior was assessed during a snack delay task. Parent‐rated child effortful control was associated with greater distinctions between moral and conventional judgments, as estimated using latent difference score modeling, but only when parents were high in positive affect. Parental hostility was associated negatively with moral‐conventional domain distinctions, but only for children with poorer behavioral self‐regulation. Finally, children high in negative affect differentiated moral and social‐conventional transgressions more only when they were rated as high in effortful control by parents. The results demonstrated that an interplay between child temperament and parenting was associated with the development of young children's moral and social‐conventional understanding.

The development of a morality against power abuse: The case of bribery.

In three experiments, we presented children and adults with opportunities to condemn acts resembling bribery, a prevalent form of power abuse. Adults and children (N = 333) in the United States rated the acceptability of actions by contest judges. Judges used their position in a self-serving (e.g., accepted or requested gifts from contestants prior to picking winners) versus responsible (e.g., rejected gifts, accepted gifts after judging) way. Across experiments, children by age 10 gave harsher ratings to judges who accepted or requested gifts prior to selecting the contest winners. Further, children expected judges to become biased (Experiment 1) and secretive (Experiment 2) if they accepted gifts during the contest. Children's judgments were influenced by characters' authority level (Experiment 3) and varied as a function of age and modality of assessment (e.g., whether gifts were accepted vs. rejected). Taken together, these results constitute evidence that by late childhood people showcase an emerging moral stance against unethical actions linked to authority-based corruption. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers.

During exploration, young children often show an intuitive sensitivity to uncertainty, despite their strong tendency towards overconfidence in their explicit judgments. Here, we examine the development of children's explicit and implicit recognition of uncertainty using the same stimuli. We presented 4- and 5-year-olds with objects that varied in their amount of perceptual occlusion, and assessed their ability to distinguish among them using two types of measures. Experiment 1 used a traditional 3-point confidence scale to examine children's explicit uncertainty judgments. We compared these confidence judgments before and after they observed disconfirming evidence, to assess the impact of this experience on their acknowledgement of uncertainty in later trials. Experiment 2 examined children's exploration preference as a measure of implicit sensitivity to uncertainty. Our results indicate that children intuitively recognize gaps in their knowledge, and that this implicit recognition may be leveraged to support their explicit judgments. Specifically, we found that children's baseline confidence judgments improved significantly following the presentation of disconfirming evidence. Furthermore, when asked to make exploration decisions about the same set of objects, children showed a spontaneous sensitivity to uncertainty, prior to any evidence. Taken together, these results suggest that children's exploration behavior may be used as an early developing measure of uncertainty control and raise the intriguing possibility that the experience of unexpected outcomes may play a role in the development of metacognition.

Children are unsuspecting meat eaters: An opportunity to address climate change

Eating a plant-based diet is one of the most effective ways people can reduce their carbon footprint. However, global consumption of meat and other animal products is increasing. Studying children's beliefs about food may shed light on the relationship between eating behaviors and climate change. Here, we examined children's knowledge of the plant and animal origins of foods, as well as children's judgments of what can be eaten, using 2 dichotomous sorting tasks. The sample consisted of 4- to 7-year-old children from the United States. We found pervasive errors in their basic food knowledge. Foods derived from animals—especially, but not exclusively meats—were among those that children understood the least well. We suggest that the results may reveal a fundamental misunderstanding in children's knowledge of animal based foods, and we discuss reasons why the origins of meat may represent a particularly challenging concept for children to grasp. We end by considering the role that children may play as agents of environmental protection.

Unusual artifacts: Linking parents' STEM background and children's animacy judgments to parent–child play with robots

Although prior work has investigated children's judgments of robots' animacy, we take a sociocultural perspective to extend this research by exploring how families' interactions with a robot and parents' STEM background relate to children's understanding of robots. We explored the social context of parent–child goal-directed play with an educational robot and asked whether children's judgments of the robot's animacy were predicted by (a) age, (b) parents' occupation (STEM, non-STEM), (c) parents' level of education, and (d) the complexity of communications with the robot. We recruited 72 parent–child dyads (3–6 years of age) at a children's museum to participate in a structured play session with a robot. Children then answered questions about animate and inanimate traits of several objects while parents completed a survey. We coded parents' and children's talk and behaviors considering the complexity of their communication with the robot. We found that children's age related to the way parents interacted with the robot, and parents' occupational category (STEM vs. non-STEM) was related to the way older children interacted with the robot. In particular, the proportion of children's complex commands increased with age for children from STEM families (but not for those from non-STEM families). We also found that children's perceived animacy for the robot was predicted by the amount of time that parents spent communicating about the robot with their child. This work highlights the need to consider children's reasoning about robots in light of social contexts within which children experience robots with parents and other people.

Neural correlates of pride and joy recognition in early childhood

I investigated neural processing during the recognition of pride and joy in early childhood using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Electroencephalography recording was taken of 21 children aged between 4 and 6 years. They were shown photographs of familiar peers and strangers whose facial expressions displayed the emotion of either pride or joy. ERPs were recorded for the children's judgment of the expression of these two emotions when an image was presented. The results demonstrate that the neural dynamics during children's recognition of pride and joy involve three stages: The early negative component is spontaneously responsive to familiar faces, the midlatency negative central component is responsive to expression of familiar faces, and the late positive component marks greater extended processing of an expression of pride. These findings provide new insight into the neural mechanism of pride and joy recognition in children aged 4 to 6 years.

Evidence for a general impairment of auditory and visual temporal order judgment in children with reading disabilities

Objectives: This study examined visual and auditory processing of children with reading disabilities (RD) to determine whether they show an impaired ability to judge a reading-related process such as temporal order of events and clarify whether or not this deficit is linked to rapid processing deficit. Method: The performance of 16 children with RD was compared with the performance of children in two control groups – one for chronological age (CA) and one for the same reading level –, doing visual and auditory temporal order tasks, both with linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli with inter-stimuli-intervals of 50, 150, or 300 ms. Results: The RD group performance was lower than the performance of the CA group in tasks requiring auditory temporal order processing for linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. Regarding visual tasks, the RD group performed worse than both control groups in processing non-linguistic stimuli. In general, performance in every group decreased with decreasing inter-stimulus-interval (ISIs), suggesting that children with RD do not have impairments in the speed of perceptual processing. Conclusions: The perceptual problems of children with RD are better explained by temporal order processing problems than by difficulties in rapid processing. Inclusion of temporal order processing tasks in the evaluation of children with RD is recommended.

"There are no band-aids for emotions": The development of thinking about emotional harm.

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms. In Experiment 1, children compared simple harms (intended and completed) and then scenarios in which the perpetrator's intention did not match the outcome (intended emotional harm, but caused physical harm, or vice-versa). Assessments of the severity of emotional (vs. physical) harm increased with age and depended on the perpetrator's intentions. In Experiment 2, children saw emotional and physical harms that were: Simple (intended and completed); Incomplete (intended, but not completed); or Accidental (not intended, but completed). Children evaluated physical and emotional harms in isolation and then compared the two. Judgments of the relative severity of emotional harm increased with age, but only when intentions and outcomes were both present. This reflected an increase with age in children's perceptions that emotional harm was hurtful, whereas perceptions of physical harm were relatively stable across development. With age, children also increasingly associated emotional harms with longer-term impacts (being remembered and reoccurring). These findings suggest reasoning about the severity, underlying intentions, and duration of emotional harm shifts with age. The results hold implications for moral development, law and psychology, and emotional-harm-related interventions including those addressing bullying. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Testing a computational model of causative overgeneralizations: Child judgment and production data from English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche’

How do language learners avoid the production of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (*The clown laughed the man c.f. The clown made the man laugh), while retaining the ability to apply such generalizations productively when appropriate? This question has long been seen as one that is both particularly central to acquisition research and particularly challenging. Focussing on causative overgeneralization errors of this type, a previous study reported a computational model that learns, on the basis of corpus data and human-derived verb-semantic-feature ratings, to predict adults’ by-verb preferences for less- versus more-transparent causative forms (e.g., *The clown laughed the man vs The clown made the man laugh) across English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche Mayan. Here, we tested the ability of this model to explain binary grammaticality judgment data from children aged 4;0-5;0, and elicited-production data from children aged 4;0-5;0 and 5;6-6;6 (N=48 per language). In general, the model successfully simulated both children’s judgment and production data, with correlations of r=0.5-0.6 and r=0.75-0.85, respectively, and also generalized to unseen verbs. Importantly, learners of all five languages showed some evidence of making the types of overgeneralization errors – in both judgments and production – previously observed in naturalistic studies of English (e.g., *I’m dancing it). Together with previous findings, the present study demonstrates that a simple discriminative learning model can explain (a) adults’ continuous judgment data, (b) children’s binary judgment data and (c) children’s production data (with no training of these datasets), and therefore constitutes a plausible mechanistic account of the retreat from overgeneralization.

Judging character: How valence and social domain support character judgments in children and adults

Children and adults completed two experiments examining the association between social actions and character judgments. In Experiment 1, participants saw actors perform acts that varied by valence (negative or positive) and social domain (moral or conventional) and judged both the acts and the actors. Findings show that both children and adults differentiated negative moral from negative conventional acts and actors, judging the former as worse and more deserving of punishment. Adults further differentiated positive moral from positive conventional acts and actors, judging the former as better and more deserving of praise. Children did not differentiate between positive acts or actors. In Experiment 2, participants saw actors with dissimilar histories and then identified the actor most likely to perform a target act. Findings show that both children and adults showed a stronger preference toward the actor whose history matched the valence, rather than the domain, of the act. Overall, our findings suggest that past social actions shape judgments about a person’s character and that these judgments are more informed by the valence of a person’s actions than by social domain.

Juicios metacognitivos en población infantil: una revisión de las tendencias conceptuales en investigación

Los juicios metacognitivos se refieren a las creencias que tienen los estudiantes antes, durante o después de verse enfrentados a una tarea de aprendizaje. En la perspectiva de los análisis bibliométricos, se encuentran como antecedentes del presente estudio, dos metaanálisis sobre juicios de aprendizaje realizados en Estados Unidos, en los que se demostró el efecto de los juicios demorados vs inmediatos.Objetivo: Establecer las tendencias conceptuales en la investigación actual sobre juicios metacognitivos para población infantil mediante una revisión sistemática. Método: Se desarrolló una búsqueda en las bases de datos Web of Science y Scopus en el período de análisis 2016-2020 para artículos publicados en idioma inglés. Una vez se aplicaron los criterios de selección, se procedió a realizar la elaboración de tablas, gráficas y análisis descriptivos. Resultados: Se analizaron finalmente 11 artículos que cumplieron con los criterios de inclusión en el estudio. Se encontraron 4 tendencias conceptuales entre las que se evidenció una importante orientación del campo hacia los estudios de monitoreo metacognitivo y aprendizaje autorregulado; una orientación menor de las investigaciones sobre trabajos en medición de juicios y en evaluación formativa a nivel de la autoevaluación. Conclusión: Se evidencia un énfasis en las tendencias de investigación por los trabajos de intervención sobre el monitireo metacognitivo.

Children's judgements of positive claims people make about themselves

AbstractAs children learn how to manage their reputation, they must assess when it is appropriate to make positive claims about themselves. To navigate this challenge effectively, they need to learn that these statements can have reputational costs as well as benefits. Although it is well established that children develop this understanding during middle childhood, it is not known whether they understand that the costs depend on the social context in which the communication takes place. The present study addresses this question by examining whether children ages 6‐ to 10‐year‐old (N = 83) evaluate positive statements people make about themselves more favourably when the statements can plausibly be interpreted as implicit offers of help. The results showed that 9‐ to 10‐year‐olds showed context sensitivity, but 6‐ to 7‐year‐olds made consistently positive ratings regardless of context.

Detecting children's true and false denials of wrongdoing: Effects of question type and base rate knowledge.

One common and unfortunately overlooked obstacle to the detection of sexual abuse is non-disclosure by children. Non-disclosure in forensic interviews may be expressed via concealment in response to recall questions or via active denials in response to recognition (e.g., yes/no) questions. In two studies, we evaluated whether adults' ability to discern true and false denials of wrongdoing by children varied as a function of the types of interview question the children were asked. Results suggest that adults are not good at detecting deceptive denials of wrongdoing by children, even when the adults view children narrate their experiences in response to recall questions rather than provide one word answers to recognition questions. In Study 1, adults exhibited a consistent "truth bias," leading them toward believing children, regardless of whether the children's denials were true or false. In Study 2, adults were given base-rate information about the occurrence of true and false denials (50% of each). The information eliminated the adults' truth bias but did not improve their overall detection accuracy, which still hovered near chance. Adults did, however, perceive children's denials as slightly more credible when they emerged in response to recall rather than recognition questions, especially when children were honestly denying wrongdoing. Results suggest the need for caution when evaluating adults' judgments of children's veracity when the children fail to disclose abuse.

Japanese and British Children's Understanding of the Social Function of Pretend Crying

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to investigate cross‐cultural differences in children's understanding of pretend crying. Five‐ and 6‐year‐olds from Japan and the United Kingdom (N = 71) heard two hypothetical stories in which the protagonist of each story pretended to cry in front of another person. Children were asked about the appearance–reality distinction of pretend crying, the other character's thoughts and behavior, and the children's own moral judgment of pretend crying. Cultural differences were found in their understanding of the social function of pretend crying. Japanese children judged that pretend crying elicited another's concern and prosocial behavior more than British children. There were no significant differences in appearance–reality distinction or moral judgments between Japanese and British children. All participants successfully discriminated between pretend crying and real crying, and most participants judged pretend crying as “not good” behavior. These results suggested that Japanese children might be more expected to be sensitive to others’ feelings, and that such cultural differences in communication and socialization lead to different patterns in expectations of the social consequences of pretend crying.

Duration judgments in children and adolescents with and without mild intellectual disability

BackgroundWhile the ability to measure time correctly is crucial for adaptation to the external physical and social environment, to date, research on timing ability and its development in individuals with intellectual disability (ID) is unfortunately remarkably scarce. AimsIn the present study, we investigated the ability of individuals with mild ID to estimate durations and the development of this ability from 11 to 19 years, in comparison to typically developing (TD) individuals. Methods and proceduresParticipants with mild ID and TD participants matched on chronological age completed two temporal tasks: (1) a temporal bisection of auditory stimuli, in which they had to decide whether arbitrary stimulus duration was more similar to the short (200 ms) or the long (800 ms) standard previously learned, and (2) a temporal categorization of familiar actions, in which short, medium or long target durations had to be paired with one of three comparison action durations. Outcomes and resultsTemporal performance was systematically impaired in participants with mild ID. Moreover, the temporal impairment increased with age in the bisection task but not in the categorization task. Conclusions and implicationsThese findings suggest that the ability to estimate durations develops at a slower pace in individuals with mild ID compared to TD individuals.