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

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.