Carolyn Baer

Algoma University · Department of Psychology

In three experiments, two hundred and ninety-seven 4- to 6-year-olds were asked to describe objects to a listener, and their answers were coded for the presence of general and specific facts. In Experiments 1 and 2, the listener's knowledge of the kinds of objects was manipulated. This affected references to specific facts at all ages, but only aff...

We report two experiments investigating how 3- to 5-year-olds learn general knowledge from pretend play—how they learn about kinds of things (e.g., information about dogs) from information about particular individuals in pretend play (a certain dog in a pretend scenario). Children watched pretend-play enactments in which animals showed certain beha...

Non-numeric stimulus features frequently influence observers' number judgments: when judging the number of items in a display, we will often (mis)perceive the set with a larger cumulative surface area as more numerous. These “congruency effects” are often used as evidence for how vision extracts numeric information and have been invoked in argument...

Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review develop-mental evidence that this metacognitive strategy does not require reportable processing. Uncertainty prompts non-verbal human infants and non-human animals to engage in strategies lik...

Learners use certainty to guide learning. They maintain existing beliefs when certain, but seek further information when they feel uninformed. Here, we review developmental evidence that this metacognitive strategy does not require reportable processing. Uncertainty prompts nonverbal human infants and nonhuman animals to engage in strategies like s...

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016–2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions...

The world can be a confusing place, which leads to a significant challenge: how do we figure out what is true? To accomplish this, children possess two relevant skills: reasoning about the likelihood of their own accuracy (metacognitive confidence) and reasoning about the likelihood of others' accuracy (mindreading). Guided by Signal Detection Theo...

Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two part...

The world can be a confusing place, which leads to a significant challenge: how do we figure out what is true? To accomplish this, children possess two relevant skills: reasoning about the likelihood of their own accuracy (metacognitive confidence) and reasoning about the likelihood of others’ accuracy (mindreading). Guided by Signal Detection Theo...

How does a person make decisions across perceptual boundaries? Here, we test the account that confidence constitutes a common currency for perceptual decisions even in childhood by examining whether confidence can be compared across distinct perceptual dimensions. We conducted a strict test of domain-generality in confidence reasoning by asking 6-...

Why do some children excel in mathematics while others struggle? A large body of work has shown positive correlations between children’s Approximate Number System (ANS) and school-taught symbolic mathematical skills, but the mechanism explaining this link remains unknown. One potential mediator of this relationship might be children’s numerical met...

Recent work has shown that the precision with which children reason about their ANS certainty improves with age: when making simple number discrimination decisions, like deciding whether there are more blue or yellow dots on the screen, older children are better able to differentiate trials that they answered correctly vs. incorrectly. Here, in two...

How do we make decisions across perceptual boundaries? Here, we test the account that certainty constitutes a common currency for perceptual decisions even in childhood by examining whether certainty can be compared across distinct perceptual dimensions. We conducted a strict test of domain-generality in perceptual certainty reasoning by asking 6-7...

Recent work has shown that the precision with which children reason about their ANS certainty improves with age: when making simple number discrimination decisions, like deciding whether there are more blue or yellow dots on the screen, older children are better able to differentiate trials that they answered correctly vs. incorrectly. Here, in two...

Our minds constantly evaluate the confidence in what we see, think, and remember. Previous work suggests that confidence is a domain-general currency in adulthood, unifying otherwise independent sensory and perceptual representations. Here, we test whether children also possess a domain-general sense of confidence over otherwise independent percept...