Phillips et al. present a number of arguments for the premise that knowledge is more basic than belief. Although their arguments are coherent and sound, they do not directly address numerous cases in which belief appears to be a developmental precursor to knowledge. I describe several examples, not necessarily as a direct challenge, but rather to better understand their framework.

How do young children develop a concept of equity? Infants prefer dividing resources equally and expect others to make such distributions. Between the ages of 3-8, children begin to exhibit preferences to avoid inequitable outcomes in their distributions, dividing resources unequally if the result of that distribution is a more equitable outcome. Four studies investigated children's developing preferences for generating equitable distributions, focusing on the mechanisms for this development. Children were presented with two characters with different amount of resources, and then a third character who will distribute more resources to them. Three- to 8-year-olds were asked whether the third character should give an equal number of resources to the recipients, preserving the inequity, or an unequal number to them, creating an equitable outcome. Starting at age 7, children showed a preference for equitable distributions (Study 1, N =144). Studies 2a (N = 72) and 2b (N =48) suggest that this development is independent of children's numerical competence. When asked to take the perspective of the recipient with fewer resources, 3- to 6-year-olds were more likely to make an equitable distribution (Study 3, N =122). These data suggest that social perspective taking underlies children's prosocial actions, and supports the hypothesis that their spontaneous capacity to take others' perspectives develops during the early elementary-school years.

In museum settings, caregivers support children's learning as they explore and interact with exhibits. Museums have developed exhibit design and facilitation strategies for promoting families' exploration and inquiry, but these strategies have rarely been contrasted. The goal of the current study was to investigate how prompts offered through staff facilitation vs. labels printed on exhibit components affected how family groups explored a circuit blocks exhibit, particularly whether children set and worked toward their own goals, and how caregivers were involved in children's play. We compared whether children, their caregivers, or both set goals as they played together, and the actions they each took to connect the circuits. We found little difference in how families set goals between the two conditions, but did find significant differences in caregivers' actions, with caregivers in the facilitation condition making fewer actions to connect circuits while using the exhibit, compared to caregivers in the exhibit labels condition. The findings suggest that facilitated and written prompts shape the quality of caregiver-child interactions in distinct ways.

Many studies have examined children's understanding of playing and learning as separate concepts, but the ways that children relate playing and learning to one another remain relatively unexplored. The current study asked 5- to 8-year-olds (N = 92) to define playing and learning, and examined whether children defined them as abstract processes or merely as labels for particular types of activities. We also asked children to state whether playing and learning can occur simultaneously, and examined whether they could give examples of playing and learning with attributes either congruent or incongruent with those activities. Older children were more likely to define both playing and learning in terms of abstract processes, rather than by describing particular topics or activities. Children who defined both playing and learning in this way were able to generate more examples of situations where they were simultaneously playing and learning, and were better able to generate examples of learning with characteristics of play, and examples of playing with characteristics of learning. These data suggest that children develop an understanding that learning and playing can coincide. These results are critical to researchers and educators who seek to integrate play and learning, as children's beliefs about these concepts can influence how they reflect on playful learning opportunities.

This study examined how inferences about epistemic competence and generalized labeling errors influence children’s selective word learning. Three‐ to 4‐year‐olds ( N = 128) learned words from informants who asked questions about objects, mentioning either correct or incorrect labels. Such questions do not convey stark differences in informants’ epistemic competence. Inaccurate labels, however, generate error signals that can lead to weaker encoding of novel information. Preschoolers retained novel labels from both informants but were slower to respond in the Inaccurate Labeler condition. When the test procedure was not sensitive to the strength of information encoding, children performed above chance in both conditions and their response times did not differ. These results suggest that epistemic‐level inferences and error generalizations influence preschoolers’ selective word learning concurrently.

Abstract Many studies have claimed to find that reading fiction leads to improvements in social cognition. But this work has left open the critical question of whether any type of narrative, fictional or nonfictional, might have similar effects. To address this question, as well as to test whether framing a narrative as fiction matters, the current studies presented participants ( N = 268 in Study 1; N = 362 in Study 2) with literary fiction texts, narrative nonfiction texts, expository nonfiction texts, or no texts. We tested their theory-of-mind abilities using the picture-based Reading the Mind in the Eyes task and a text-based test of higher-order social cognition. Reading anything was associated with higher scores compared to reading nothing, but the effects of framing and text type were inconsistent. These results suggest that prior claims regarding positive effects of reading fiction on mentalizing should be seen as tenuous; other mechanisms may be driving previously published effects.

Children use speakers' past accuracy to make inferences about novel word meanings those individuals provide in the future. An open question is whether children can retrospectively reevaluate information after learning that the source was inaccurate. We addressed this question in two experiments where a speaker first introduced labels for novel objects and then revealed that she is either accurate or inaccurate in naming familiar objects. Experiment 1 showed that 3.5- to 6.5-year-olds displayed enhanced performance on a word knowledge test when they had learned novel words from a speaker who then showed herself to be an accurate labeler as opposed to an inaccurate labeler. Experiment 2 replicated this procedure but had a different speaker provide inaccurate label information. This manipulation did not affect learning, suggesting that children discount speakers and are not simply influenced by the demands of processing inaccurate information. Together, these results indicate that 3.5- to 6.5-year-olds continue to monitor the speakers' accuracy after learning new words from them, update their beliefs as accuracy data become available, and selectively retain words learned from speakers who they deem to be epistemically competent. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The current study investigated the relation between the ways in which caregivers and children interact in a learning environment and children's learning outcomes and engagement with the learning task. We assessed caregiver-child interaction in a structured play environment in which 3- and 4-year-olds and a caregiver were tasked with learning a causal system. Children whose caregivers were more directive during their interaction learned the causal system the best and better than children whose caregivers were more hands off and allowed children to engage in unstructured exploration. These two groups of children explored for the same amount of time, indicating similar levels of engagement with the task. Children whose caregivers were more guiding, but not directive, played significantly longer than either of the other groups, suggesting deeper engagement. We discuss these findings in relation to how children engage in causal learning and how caregivers might contribute to children's learning and engagement with the learning process. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Children's creativity is often investigated through adults' subjective judging of novelty in a product, or by assessing the flexibility of children's thinking. These approaches do not explicitly ask children to reflect on what they think is creative and often ignore children's metacognitive understanding of creativity. We took two approaches to examining this development. First, using semi-structured interviews, we asked children, ages of 5-10 (N = 75), to define creativity and reflect theirs and others' creative actions (Study 1). As children got older, they reflected more on the novelty of the action and were more likely to describe creativity as a process that could be applied generally. Second, using more laboratory-based methods, we asked 5- to 10-year-olds (N = 137) and adults (N = 150) about the role that novelty (Study 2) and utility (Study 3) play in creative actions. In Study 2, children were more likely to judge that a novel action was more creative as they got older, and there was no difference between children and adults' responses by age 8. In Study 3, when two novel actions were contrasted, and one was more useful (but less novel), adults chose the useful action as more creative, whereas older children chose the more novel action. Overall, children's understanding of creativity as a general process undergoes significant change around mid-childhood, which has implications for its importance for informal learning environments.