This study investigates the interaction between preschoolers ’ initial theories and their ability to learn causal relations from patterns of data. Children observed ambiguous evidence in which sets of two candidate causes co-occurred with an effect (e.g. A&B � E, A&C � E, A&D � E, etc). In one condition, all candidate causes were from the appropriate domain (a biological cause for a biological effect); in another condition, the recurring candidate cause, A, crossed domains (a psychological cause for a biological effect). When all causes were domainappropriate, children were able to use the data to identify A as a cause. When the recurring cause crossed domains, children were less likely to endorse A. However, preschoolers were significantly more willing to accept cross-domain causes after seeing the evidence than at baseline. A Bayesian model is proposed to explain this interaction. Very young children have remarkably sophisticated causal knowledge about the world. Children reason about the causes of mental states (e.g., Meltzoff, 1995), physical systems (e.g., Bullock, Gelman, & Baillargeon, 1982; Shultz, 1982), and biological events (e.g., Gelman & Wellman, 1991; Kalish, 1996). Preschoolers can even make predictions about hidden variables and explain events in terms of unobservable causes (Schulz & Sommerville, in press). Many researchers have suggested that children’s causal knowledge can be characterized as intuitive theories: abstract, coherent, defeasible representations of causal

Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with domaingeneral statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these factors, the authors presented preschoolers with stories pitting their existing theories against statistical evidence. Each child heard 2 stories in which 2 candidate causes co-occurred with an effect. Evidence was presented in the

The critical thinking movement, it is suggested, has much to gain from conceptualizing its subject matter in a developmental frame-work. Most instructional programs designed to teach critical thinking do not draw on contemporary empirical research in cog-nitive development as a potential resource. The developmental model of critical thinking outlined here derives from contemporary empirical research on directions and processes of intellectual de-velopment in children and adolescents. It identifies three forms of second-order cognition (meta-knowing)--metacognitive, metas-trategic, and epistemological--that constitute an essential part of what develops cognitively to make critical thinking possible. E Educational Researcher, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 16-26, 46 nthusiasm for critical thinking as a goal of education shows no signs of waning. Pluralist conceptions of

Four experiments compared the permanence of imagined and perceived objects. A new method for assessing object permanence in older children and adults was used that tested participants ’ preparedness to acknowledge that an object could change as a result of magical intervention. In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-year-old children and adults treated perceived and imagined objects (pieces of paper) as being equally permanent. In Experiment 2, adults treated a fantastic object (a flying dog) as significantly less permanent than either perceived or imagined objects, but children failed to distinguish between fantastic and imagined objects. Experiment 3 employed a different type of mental-physical causality (an attempt to change objects with the help of a participant’s own wish). Results were similar to those of Experiment 2. In Experiment 4, adults were tested on permanence of personally significant imagined objects (participants ’ images of their future lives). Although almost all participants claimed that they did not believe in magic, in test trials they were not prepared to rule out the possibility that their future lives could be affected by a magical curse. The results are used to explain psychological roots of magical thinking and practices. Implications of these findings for cognitive development and more specifically children’s theory of mind reasoning are discussed. Key words: object permanence, magical thinking, mental-physical causality, imaginary reality. 2

x- treme from Fodor; she argues that albiexical concepts can be derived by combinations of twenty -three universal, innate primitives. A variety of evidence supports the nativist position. Take the concept of object as a case in point. By objects, I mean bounded, coherent wholes that endure through time and move on spatio-temporally continuous paths. Two extremely convincing lines of argument show this concept to 89 be largely innate. The first is direct empirical evidence demonstrating it in infants as young as two to four months. The second derives from learnability considerations. If one wants to argue that two-month-olds have constructed the concept of an object, one must show, in principle, how they could have done so. From what primitives, and on what evi- dence? Not for lack of trying, nobody has ever shown how this concept could be formed out of some prior set of primitives. What would lead an organism existing in a Quinean perceptual quality space, sensitive only t