Silvia Guerrero

Oxygen and the Soul: Children's Conception of Invisible Entities

In two studies, childrens concepts of various types of ordinarily unobservable entities were examined. Study 1 confirmed earlier findings in showing that children aged 4–9 years are confident of the existence of scientific entities such as germs as well as religious beings such as God. At the same time, both age groups are skeptical of the existence of various mythical beings such as mermaids. In Study 2, older children aged 10–12 years were probed for their concepts of religious as compared to scientific phenomena. Despite considerable confidence in each type, older children differentiated between them, both with respect to their level of confidence and their pattern of justification.

Children's understandings of counting: detection of errors and pseudoerrors by kindergarten and primary school children.

In this study, the development of comprehension of essential and nonessential aspects of counting is examined in children ranging from 5 to 8 years of age. Essential aspects, such as logical rules, and nonessential aspects, including conventional rules, were studied. To address this, we created a computer program in which children watched counting errors (abstraction and order irrelevance errors) and pseudoerrors (with and without cardinal value errors) occurring during a detection task. The children judged whether the characters had counted the items correctly and were asked to justify their responses. In general, our data show that performance improved substantially with age in terms of both error and pseudoerror detection; furthermore, performance was better with regard to errors than to pseudoerrors as well as on pseudoerror tasks with cardinal values versus those without cardinal values. In addition, the childrens justifications, for both the errors and pseudoerrors, made possible the identification of conventional rules underlying the incorrect responses. A particularly relevant trend was that children seem to progressively ignore these rules as they grow older. Nevertheless, this process does not end at 8 years of age given that the conventional rules of temporal and spatial adjacency were present in their judgments and were primarily responsible for the incorrect responses.

‘We are the good guys but they are not bad’. In-group positivity and cognitive performance in preschoolers

The general purpose of this study was to analyse the developmental relations between the early forms of ethnic attitudes, and the classification abilities of the young child. We designed new cognitive tasks within a detection paradigm adapted to preschoolers and attitudinal tasks that were presented as games in a computer screen. Participants were 75 majority-group children of 3, 4, and 5 years of age. Childrens preferences and positive/negative attitudes towards the in-group (Spaniards) and three out-groups (Latin-Americans, Africans, and Asians) were measured. The results showed a remarkable preference and positivity for the in-group, but not out-group derogation. Childrens cognitive performance, to a greater extent than their age, was positively associated with in-group favouritism and positivity. On the other hand, we found some interesting differences and developmental changes in childrens positive orientation to the out-groups that are discussed in the last section.

How do secondary students approach different types of division with remainder situations? Some evidence from Spain

Division-With-Remainder (DWR) problems are particularly complex, as suggested in many studies. The purpose of this work was to establish whether students’ difficulties in DWR problems came from an inadequate initial representation or from an inadequate final interpretation of the numerical answers, and whether remainders could be grouped into two blocks depending on the kind of answer, either directly matching the terms of the division or not. Forty-five Spanish secondary students, aged 12–13, were requested to solve two Types of Division Situations (i.e., Equal Groups and Comparison), each one involving four Types of Remainder (i.e., Remainder-Not-Divisible, Remainder-Divisible, Remainder-as-the-Result, and Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments). Our data showed that: (a) the selection of the correct solution procedure depended on the Type of Division Situations, being easier in Equal Groups than in Comparison problems; (b) correct interpretations were higher than the percentages reported in other researches; and (c) success in problems whose answers were the quotient or the remainder was higher than in Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments problems. The results obtained suggest that students’ difficulties originate in the initial representation of the DWR problems and that it would be more adequate to refer to the difficulty of Readjusted-Quotient-by-Partial-Increments problems in particular, rather than to the difficulty of DWR problems in general.RésuméDe nombreuses études ont suggéré que les problèmes de Division-Avec-Reste (DAR) sont particulièrement complexes. L’objectif de ce travail était d’identifier si l’origine des problèmes des élèves avec la DAR se situait bien dans une représentation initiale ou bien dans une interprétation finale inadéquate des réponses numériques, ainsi que d’établir si les restes d’une division pouvaient se grouper en deux blocs selon que le type de réponse soit ou non directement assorti aux termes de la division. On a demandé à quarante-cinq lycéens espagnols de 12–13 ans de résoudre deux Types de Situations de Division (c’est-à-dire Groupes Egaux et Comparaisons), chacune impliquant quatre Types de Reste (c’est-à-dire Reste-Non-Divisible, Reste-Divisible, Reste-Comme-Résultat, et Quotient-Réajusté-par-Incréments-Partiels). Nos résultats ont montré que: (a) la sélection de la procédure de résolution correcte dépendait du Type de Situations de Division, et était plus facile dans les problèmes de Groupes Égaux que dans ceux de Comparaisons; (b) les pourcentages d’interprétations correctes étaient supérieurs aux pourcentages rapportés dans d’autres études, et (c) le succès était supérieur avec les problèmes dont les réponses étaient le quotient ou dont le reste était supérieur à ce qu’il était dans les problèmes de Quotient-Réajusté-par-Incréments-Partiels. Les résultats obtenus indiquent que les difficultés des élèves avaient leur origine dans leur représentation initiale des problèmes DAR, et qu’il serait plus adéquat de parler de la difficulté des problèmes de Quotient-Réajusté-par-Incréments-Partiels que d’une difficulté plus générale des “problèmes de Division-Avec-Reste”.

El prejuicio étnico-racial. Una revisión de estudios evolutivos en España con niños y preadolescentes españoles y extranjeros

Resumen En este artículo se revisan algunos resultados de la investigación evolutiva En España sobre el prejuicio étnico en la niñez y preadolescencia. Desde un enfoque sociocognitivo-evolutivo, se examinan algunos precursores del prejuicio en la infancia, como son las habilidades de categorización y autoidentificación étnica y las primeras actitudes, así como capacidades más tardías que surgen en la preadolescencia, relacionadas con la toma de conciencia de la discriminación social y de sus repercusiones en las víctimas. Algunos de estos resultados se comparan con los de investigaciones realizadas en países de composición multiétnica. Se describen también estudios con niños latinoamericanos que residen en España y se comparan los resultados obtenidos en ambos grupos (mayoritario y minoritario) discutiendo sus implicaciones sociales.

What Makes Children Defy Majorities? The Role of Dissenters in Chinese and Spanish Preschoolers’ Social Judgments

When many people say the same thing, the individual is more likely to endorse this information than when just a single person says the same. Yet, the influence of consensus information may be modulated by many personal, contextual and cultural variables. Here, we study the sensitivity of Chinese (N = 68) and Spanish (N = 82) preschoolers to consensus in social decision making contexts. Children faced two different types of peer-interaction events, which involved (1) uncertain or ambiguous scenarios open to interpretation (social interpretation context), and (2) explicit scenarios depicting the exclusion of a peer (moral judgment context). Children first observed a video in which a group of teachers offered their opinion about the events, and then they were asked to evaluate the information provided. Participants were assigned to two conditions that differed in the type of consensus: Unanimous majority (non-dissenter condition) and non-unanimous majority (dissenter condition). In the dissenter condition, we presented the conflicting opinions of three teachers vs. one teacher. In the non-dissenter condition, we presented the unanimous opinion of three teachers. The general results indicated that children’s sensitivity to consensus varies depending both on the degree of ambiguity of the social events and the presence or not of a dissenter: (1) Children were much more likely to endorse the majority view when they were uncertain (social interpretation context), than when they already had a clear interpretation of the situation (moral judgment context); (2) The presence of a dissenter resulted in a significant decrease in children’s confidence in majority. Interestingly, in the moral judgment context, Chinese and Spanish children differed in their willingness to defy a majority whose opinion run against their own. While Spanish children maintained their own criteria regardless of the type of condition, Chinese children did so when an “allied” dissenter was present (dissenter condition) but not when confronting a unanimous majority (non-dissenter condition). Tentatively, we suggest that this difference might be related to culture-specific patterns regarding children’s deference toward adults.