Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Children's sensitivity to circular explanations.

Laura A Baum1, Judith H Danovitch, Frank C Keil

  • 1Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA.

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
|December 15, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

"I've seen Google before!": Young children's intuitions about Google's capabilities.

Child development·2026
Same author

"How much do I know?": Children's evaluations of their absolute and relative knowledge.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2025
Same author

No privileged link between intentionality and causation: Generalizable effects of agency in language.

Cognition·2025
Same author

Herding cats: children and adults infer collective decision speed from team size and diversity, but disagree about whether consensus strength matters more than team size.

Cognition·2025
Same author

Does intellectual humility transmit intergenerationally? Examining relations between parent and child measures.

Journal of experimental psychology. General·2025
Same author

Mechanistic complexity is fundamental: Evidence from judgments, attention, and memory.

Journal of experimental psychology. General·2024
Same journal

"I want to keep going": Differential effects of storybooks on children's perseverance.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2026
Same journal

Memory for a dinosaur exhibit: retrieval-based practice vs. restudy.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2026
Same journal

The interplay between Theory of Mind inferencing and visual attention in narrative comprehension in autistic preschoolers.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2026
Same journal

Executive function and preschoolers' responses to severe transgressions: implications for early forgiveness.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2026
Same journal

Shared cognitive risk factors underlying rapid automatized naming deficits for the comorbidity of developmental dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: A computational parameter estimation via Bundesen's theory of visual attention.

Journal of experimental child psychology·2026
Same journal

Do young children understand the objectivity of reality?

Journal of experimental child psychology·2026
See all related articles

Children develop the ability to spot faulty explanations. By age 10, they can robustly identify and prefer noncircular explanations over circular ones, showing rapid growth in critical thinking skills.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Development
  • Child Psychology
  • Epistemology

Background:

  • Evaluating explanation quality is crucial for intellectual growth.
  • Explanations can possess structural flaws, such as circularity.
  • Circular explanations repeat the question without providing new information.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate children's ability to differentiate between circular and noncircular explanations.
  • To determine the developmental trajectory of evaluating explanation quality based on structural grounds.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments were conducted with 77 children.
  • Children were presented with both circular and noncircular explanations.
  • Preferences between explanation types were recorded.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • A fragile preference for noncircular explanations was observed in 5- to 6-year-olds.
  • This preference became robust by 10 years of age.
  • Children's ability to assess explanation quality develops significantly during elementary school.

Conclusions:

  • Children's capacity to evaluate explanations structurally emerges early.
  • Rapid development in this skill occurs throughout elementary school years.
  • This developmental progression is vital for children's critical thinking and learning.