The development of children's ability to use evidence to infer reality status.

Full Abstract

These studies investigate children's use of scientific reasoning to infer the reality status of novel entities. Four- to 8-year-olds heard about novel entities and were asked to infer their reality status from 3 types of evidence: supporting evidence, irrelevant evidence, and no evidence. Experiment 1 revealed that children used supporting versus irrelevant and no evidence differentially. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children without initial reality status biases were better at evaluating evidence than were biased children. In conclusion, the ability to infer reality status from evidence develops incrementally between ages 4 and 6, and children perform better when their evaluation is free from bias.

Author information

Author/s: Tullos, Ansley (A); Woolley, Jacqueline D (JD);

Affiliation: Department of Psychology, The University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA. tullos(-atsign-)mail.utexas.edu

Grants: HD030300 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Child development (Child Dev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: -2009 Jan-Feb; vol 80 (issue 1) : pp 101-14

Dates: Created 2009/02/24; Completed 2009/06/09; Revised 2009/09/16;

PMID: 19236395, status: MEDLINE (last retrieved date: 9/17/2009)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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