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Research in both laboratory and museum settings suggests that children's exploration and caregiver-child interaction relate to children's learning and engagement. Most of this work, however, takes a third-person perspective on children's exploration of a single activity or exhibit, and does not consider children's perspectives on their own exploration. In contrast, the current study recruited 6-to 10-year-olds (N = 52) to wear GoPro cameras, which recorded their first-person perspectives as they explored a dinosaur exhibition in a natural history museum. During a 10-min period, children were allowed to interact with 34 different exhibits, their caregivers and families, and museum staff however they wished. Following their exploration, children were asked to reflect on their exploration while watching the video they created and to report on whether they had learned anything. Children were rated as more engaged when they explored collaboratively with their caregivers. Children were more likely to report that they learned something when they were more engaged, and when they spent more time at exhibits that presented information didactically rather than being interactive. These results suggest that static exhibits have an important role to play in fostering learning experiences in museums, potentially because such exhibits allow for more caregiver-child interaction.

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The authors argue that children prefer fictions with imaginary worlds. But evidence from the developmental literature challenges this claim. Children's choices of stories and story events show that they often prefer realism. Further, work on the imagination's relation to counterfactual reasoning suggests that an attraction to unrealistic fiction would undermine the imagination's role in helping children understand reality.

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We examined 6- to 9-year-olds' (N = 60, 35 girls, 34% White, 23% Hispanic, 2% Black/African American, 2% Asian/Asian American, 22% Mixed Ethnicity/Race, 17% Unavailable, collected April-September 2019 in Providence, RI, USA) first-person perspectives on their exploration of museum exhibits. We coded goal setting, goal completion, and behaviors that reflected changes to how goals were accomplished. Whether children played collaboratively related to how often they revised behaviors to accomplish goals (OR = 2.14). When asked to reflect on their play, older children related talk about goals with behavioral revisions, demonstrating that children develop the ability to reflect on their goals when they watch their behaviors change (OR = 1.23). We discuss how these results inform the development of metacognitive reflection on learning through exploration.

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Fictional stories for children are often designed to teach new information such as vocabulary words and problem-solving solutions. Past work has shown that children can learn real-world information from these fictional sources, but we do not yet understand the full scope of how different variables affect this learning process. The articles in this special issue aimed to address this question, paying particular attention to the ways in which the fantastical elements that are so common in children's media might affect their learning. In this editorial introduction, we draw out common themes from these articles and identify open questions in this field. Specifically, although there is clearly more work to be done, these articles demonstrate that fantasy can sometimes benefit children's learning, that learning is affected by children's prior knowledge and by how the educational information is integrated into the story, and that it is important to disentangle the type of target educational information (e.g., new facts vs. executive function strategies) from the type of fictional context used to teach it.

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Prior work has found that Americans' views on evolution are significantly and positively related to their understanding of this theory. However, whether this relationship is cross-culturally robust is unknown. This article extends earlier work by measuring and comparing the acceptance and understanding of evolution among highly educated individuals in China and the United States. We find a significantly higher evolution acceptance level in the Chinese sample than in the US sample, but no significant difference in their average levels of evolution knowledge. Our analysis also shows that accepting evolutionary theory is related to understanding in both the US and the Chinese samples. These results provide evidence for the robustness of the relationship between understanding and acceptance of evolution across different cultural contexts. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to comprehensively test understanding of evolutionary theory within a Chinese sample and to compare these results with the US sample.

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While people's views about science are related to identity factors (e.g. political orientation) and to knowledge of scientific theories, knowledge about how science works in general also plays an important role. To test this claim, we administered two detailed assessments about the practices of science to a demographically representative sample of the US public (N = 1500), along with questions about the acceptance of evolution, climate change, and vaccines. Participants' political and religious views predicted their acceptance of scientific claims, as in prior work. But a greater knowledge of the nature of science and a more mature view of how to mitigate scientific disagreements each related positively to acceptance. Importantly, the positive effect of scientific thinking on acceptance held regardless of participants' political ideology or religiosity. Increased attention to developing people's knowledge of how science works could thus help to combat resistance to scientific claims across the political and religious spectrum.

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Educational media often contain fantastical information. Although some prior research suggests that this information interferes with children's learning, other work shows that fantasy benefits learning under certain circumstances. To investigate this issue and to clarify how different types of fantastical events might affect children's learning, we presented preschoolers (N = 99 in Study 1; N = 101 in Study 2) with stories that contained events that violated real-world physical laws, violated real-world biological laws, or did not violate any real-world laws. Within each story, we embedded two pieces of educational information, one each from the domains of biology and physics, to test (a) whether there are benefits of fantastical information on learning and (b) whether such benefits are domain specific. Across both studies, we found that children generally learned both types of information best from the story with physical violations, suggesting that such events can bolster children's learning.

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The three studies presented here examine children's ability to make diagnostic inferences about an interactive causal structure across different domains. Previous work has shown that children's abilities to make diagnostic inferences about a physical system develops between the ages of 5 and 8. Experiments 1 (N = 242) and 2 (N = 112) replicate this work with 4- to 10-year-olds and demonstrate that this developmental trajectory is preserved when children reason about a closely matched biological system. Unlike Experiments 1 and 2, Experiment 3 (N = 110) demonstrates that children struggle to make similar inferences when presented with a parallel task about category membership in biology. These results suggest that children might have the basic capacity for diagnostic inference at relatively early ages, but that the content of the inference task might interfere with their ability to demonstrate such capacities.

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Non-experts are unduly attracted to explanations of scientific phenomena that contain irrelevant reductive language (e.g., explanations of biological phenomena that mention chemistry; Hopkins, Weisberg, & Taylor, 2016). To determine if expertise would reduce this reasoning error, the current study recruited individuals with graduate-level training in six scientific fields and in philosophy (N = 580) and asked them to judge explanations for phenomena from those fields. Like the novices in Hopkins et al. (2016), scientists' ratings of bad explanations were influenced by reductive information when viewing phenomena from outside their field of expertise, but they were less likely to show this bias when reasoning about their own field. Higher levels of educational attainment did improve detection of bad explanations. These results indicate that advanced training in science or logic can lead to more accurate reasoning about explanations, but does not mitigate the reductive allure effect.

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Previous work has found that people are drawn to explanations of psychological phenomena when these explanations contain neuroscience information, even when that information is irrelevant. This preference may be due to a general preference for reductive explanations; however, prior work has not investigated whether people indeed prefer such explanations or whether this preference varies by scientific discipline. The current study asked 82 participants to choose which methods would be most appropriate for investigating topics in six scientific fields. Participants generally preferred methods that either matched the field of investigation (e.g., biology for biology) or that came from the immediately more reductive field (e.g., chemistry for biology). Both of these patterns were especially evident for the pairing of psychology and neuroscience. Additionally, participants selected significantly more methods as being useful for explaining neuroscience phenomena. These results suggest that people's sense of the relations among scientific fields are fairly well calibrated but display some general attraction to neuroscience.

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Do choices about which moral actions to take cohere with subsequent judgments of their outcomes? The first set of experiments (N = 60 preschoolers and 30 adults) directly compared whether moral choices and judgments reflect distinct considerations, and whether coherence varies based on the valence of the moral scenario. Participants' responses suggested that moral principles may be applied differently for moral choices and judgments, and that harm-based situations are particularly demanding for children. To determine whether children's difficulty with harm-based situations reflects demand characteristics, a second set of experiments presented forty-three preschoolers and thirty-nine adults with a moral dilemma wherein they could choose to omit an action and maximize harm or act to minimize harm. Both age groups acted to minimize harm when caused indirectly. These results suggest that making choices about harm are not unilaterally demanding for preschoolers, but they struggle to make choices that minimize harm in a forced-choice scenario.

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Kidd and Castano (in press) critique our failure to replicate Kidd and Castano (2013) on 3 grounds: failure to exclude people who did not read the texts, failure of random assignment, and failure to exclude people who did not take the Author Recognition Test (ART). This response addresses each of these critiques. Most importantly, we note that even when Kidd and Castano reanalyzed our data in the way that they argue is most appropriate, they still failed to replicate the pattern of results reported in their original study. We thus reaffirm that our replication of Kidd and Castano (2013) found no evidence that literary fiction uniquely and immediately improves theory of mind. Our objective remains not to prove that reading literary fiction does not benefit social cognition, but to call for in-depth research addressing the difficulties in measuring any potential effect and to note the need to temper claims accordingly. (PsycINFO Database Record

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The Distancing factor of Menninghaus et al.'s model includes schemas that remind consumers that the representation is fictional. Although they claim that these schemas are crucial to the functioning of the Embracing factor of the model, we argue that consumers can have similar responses to nonfictional representations. We urge the authors to expand their model to include such cases.

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[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 111(5) of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (see record 2016-50315-003). In the article, due to an error in stimulus construction, four items (three authors, one foil) were omitted from the ART presented to all participants tested by Research Group 1. These omissions do not undermine the results in the primary analyses, which all included ART and ART Condition (as covariates). Any variation across research groups, including this difference in reading exposure measurement, is accounted for in the multilevel analyses. Therefore, the Table 2 title should appear as Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET) Scores by Condition and Overall Unadjusted Means for the Current Study and Kidd and Castano (2013), as Well as the Zero-Order Pearson's Correlations Between RMET and ART Scores Overall and by Condition. The ART data columns should be deleted, and the table note should begin as follows: RMET scores were transformed to correct for skew prior to correlational analyses. The section title above the Discussion section should appear as Comparison of Our RMET Scores to Kidd and Castano Data, with the first two sentences appearing as follows: To determine whether the responses in our sample were similar to what Kidd and Castano (2013) found, we compared our mean performance on the RMET to theirs. Our grand mean (26.28) was significantly higher than theirs (25.18), t(1=, 374) = 3.71, p< .001, d = 0.21. All versions of this article have been corrected.] Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others' cognitive and emotional states. Kidd and Castano (2013) received a great deal of attention by providing support for this claim. Their article reported that reading segments of literary fiction (but not popular fiction or nonfiction) immediately and significantly improved performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), an advanced theory-of-mind test. Here we report a replication attempt by 3 independent research groups, with 792 participants randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions (literary fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction, and no reading). In contrast to Kidd and Castano (2013), we found no significant advantage in RMET scores for literary fiction compared to any of the other conditions. However, as in Kidd and Castano and previous research, the Author Recognition Test, a measure of lifetime exposure to fiction, consistently predicted RMET scores across conditions. We conclude that the most plausible link between reading fiction and theory of mind is either that individuals with strong theory of mind are drawn to fiction and/or that a lifetime of reading gradually strengthens theory of mind, but other variables, such as verbal ability, may also be at play. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Previous work has found that people feel significantly more satisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena when those explanations contain neuroscience information-even when this information is entirely irrelevant to the logic of the explanations. This seductive allure effect was first demonstrated by Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, and Gray (2008), and has since been replicated several times (Fernandez-Duque, Evans, Christian, & Hodges, 2015; Minahan & Siedlecki, 2016; Rhodes, Rodriguez, & Shah, 2014; Weisberg, Taylor, & Hopkins, 2015). However, these studies only examined psychological phenomena. The current study thus investigated the generality of this effect and found that it occurs across several scientific disciplines whenever the explanations include reductive information: reference to smaller components or more fundamental processes. These data suggest that people have a general preference for reductive information, even when it is irrelevant to the logic of an explanation.

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Pretend play is a form of playful behavior that involves nonliteral action. Although on the surface this activity appears to be merely for fun, recent research has discovered that children's pretend play has connections to important cognitive and social skills, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. The current article first defines pretend play and then reviews the arguments and evidence for these three connections. Pretend play has a nonliteral correspondence to reality, hence pretending may provide children with practice with navigating symbolic relationships, which may strengthen their language skills. Pretend play and theory of mind reasoning share a focus on others' mental states in order to correctly interpret their behavior, hence pretending and theory of mind may be mutually supportive in development. Pretend play and counterfactual reasoning both involve representing nonreal states of affairs, hence pretending may facilitate children's counterfactual abilities. These connections make pretend play an important phenomenon in cognitive science: Studying children's pretend play can provide insight into these other abilities and their developmental trajectories, and thereby into human cognitive architecture and its development.

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A school became safer after security measures were removed. Children can learn better in playful, rather than didactic, settings. At-risk students earned higher grades after writing about a personal value. A novel construct - mise en place--explains how small changes in context, such as these, can lead to large changes in behaviors by highlighting how the psychology of preparing to act within an environment shapes and is shaped by that environment.

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Lillard et al. (2013) concluded that pretend play is not causally related to child outcomes and charged that the field is subject to a play ethos, whereby research is tainted by a bias to find positive effects of play on child development. In this commentary, we embrace their call for a more solidly scientific approach to questions in this important area of study while offering 2 critiques of their analysis. First, we urge researchers to take a more holistic approach to the body of evidence on play and learning, rather than relying on piecemeal criticisms of individual studies, since positive effects of play on learning emerge despite the use of a variety of methods, contents, and experimental conditions. Second, we consider how best to study this topic in the future and propose moving away from traditional empirical approaches to more complicated statistical models and methods that will allow us to embrace the full variety and complexity of playful learning.

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Each fictional world that adults create has its own distinct properties, separating it from other fictional worlds. Here we explore whether this separation also exists for young children's pretend game worlds. Studies 1 and 1A set up two simultaneous games and encouraged children to create appropriate pretend identities for coloured blocks. When prompted with a situation that required the use of a Game 1 object in Game 2, 3- and 4-year-olds were reluctant to move pretend objects between games, even when the alternative-world object was explicitly highlighted as a possible choice. Study 2 found the same effect when the two game worlds were presented sequentially. This suggests that, even for young children, multiple pretend game worlds are kept psychologically separate.

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