Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 21, 2026

Quantifying Learning in Young Infants: Tracking Leg Actions During a Discovery-learning Task
Published on: June 1, 2015
How young children learn from examples: descriptive and inferential problems
Charles W Kalish1, Sunae Kim, Andrew G Young
1Department of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. cwkalish@wisc.edu
Abstract:
Three experiments with preschool- and young school-aged children (N = 75 and 53) explored the kinds of relations children detect in samples of instances (descriptive problem) and how they generalize those relations to new instances (inferential problem). Each experiment initially presented a perfect biconditional relation between two features (e.g., all and only frogs are blue). Additional examples undermined one of the component conditional relations (not all frogs are blue) but supported another (only frogs are blue). Preschool-aged children did not distinguish between supported and undermined relations. Older children did show the distinction, at least when the test instances were clearly drawn from the same population as the training instances. Results suggest that younger children's difficulties may stem from the demands of using imperfect correlations for predictions. Older children seemed sensitive to the inferential problem of using samples to make predictions about populations.
Related Concept Videos
Observational Learning
Piaget's Stage 2 of Cognitive Development
Inductive Reasoning
Inductive reasoning is common in descriptive science. A life scientist makes observations and records them. This data can be qualitative or...
Cognitive Learning
E. C. Tolman's theory of purposive behavior emphasizes that much behavior is goal-directed. He argued that to understand behavior, we must look at the entire sequence of actions leading to a goal. For instance, high school students study hard, not just due to past reinforcement but also to achieve the goal of getting into a good college.
Tolman introduced the idea that behavior is influenced by...
Deductive Reasoning
For example, a researcher can deduce specific predictions...
Problem-Solving

