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In this study the author examined why children and adults think they need to eat. Preschoolers through adults were provided with physiological, social, psychological, and routine causes for eating breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner, and were asked to either agree or disagree with the causal responses provided. A 4 Reason × 4 Meal repeated measures analysis of variance revealed significant main effects for meals and reasons, as well as significant Meal × Reason and Meal × Reason × Grade interactions. The effect sizes ranged from 0.1 to 0.7. Across all age groups, participants acknowledged physiological needs and desires (fulfilling hunger and needs to stay healthy) and routine (e.g., it is dinner time) as the primary causes for eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, for snack physiological needs were the primary reason. Second-grade students onward spontaneously produced biological justifications such as the need for energy and nutrition as important reasons for food consumption. These results lend support to the developmental model that children's and adults’ understanding of eating changes in middle childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors promote conceptual (deep) processing in young children? In this research we examine two factors that seem likely to invite a focus on important conceptual information. The first is comparison processing: comparisons (such as “cats are like dogs”) involve a structural alignment that highlights common relational structure as well as differences connected to that structure. The second factor is the use of generic language (such as “cats have sharp teeth”), which invites a construal organized around information that is relatively central to the represented item. We ask whether these two forces can combine to foster deep processing in 4-year-olds, as well as in adults. Our secondary goal is to test whether the process of comparison operates in the same way in preschool children as in adults. In two studies (N = 132), we examined preschool children's and adults' comparison processing, by asking participants to produce either commonalities or differences for pairs of items while varying similarity (highversus low) and wording (generic versus specific). As predicted, for both ages, (a) high-similarity pairs generated both more commonalities and more alignable differences than low-similarity pairs; (b) generic wording differed from specific language in relatively more deep properties for both ages; and (c) the combination of generic language and high similarity was especially favorable for producing deep properties. The detailed parallels between age groups suggest that the same comparison processes hold for children as for adults. Most important, the results show that two ways of highlighting deep conceptual structure—generic language and structural alignment—can be combined to provide a source of insight for both children and adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages distinguish generic utterances (e.g., 'Tigers are ferocious') from non-generic utterances (e.g., 'Those tigers are ferocious'). Two studies examined how generic language specially links properties and categories. We used a novel-word extension task to ask if 4- to 5-year-old children and adults distinguish between generic and specific language, and judge that predicating a property of a depicted novel animal using generic language (e.g., 'Bants have stripes'), rather than non-generic language (e.g., 'This bant has stripes') implies a more kind-relevant connection between category and property. Participants were asked to endorse an extension of the label taught to a novel animal matching the target instance on either overall similarity or the mentioned property. Wording was found to have a significant effect on responses for both age groups. Altogether, the results of these studies suggest that the generic may be a default interpretation for young children, who need to learn the semantics of specific and set-theoretic expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigated three seemingly contradictory views of the conception of illness: (a) the traditional, development "naive child" view; (b) a more contemporary, "sophisticated child" outlook; and (c) a largely social-psychological, "irrational adult" approach. They concluded that participants had a variety of views of the conception of illness and that they used different views in different experimental contexts. They found that, under certain conditions, children appeared to have sophisticated beliefs; under other conditions, children, and even adults, showed signs of folkloric and immanent justice reasoning. They also found that, with advancing grade level, children increasingly recognized psychological contributors to the cause of illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]