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ABSTRACT Several studies suggest that children's learning and engagement with the content of play activities is affected by the ways parents and children interact. In particular, when parents are overly directive and set more goals during play with their children, their children tend to play less or are less engaged by subsequent challenges with the activity on their own. A concern, however, is that this directed interaction style is only compared with other styles of parent–child interaction, not with a baseline measure of engagement or learning. The present study incorporates such a baseline measure, comparing it with previously‐collected data on children's engagement and learning in a set of circuit‐building challenges. Regarding engagement, children were less engaged by the challenges when their parents were more directed during a free play setting (tested in Sobel et al. 2021) than when children had no prior experience playing with the circuit components. Regarding learning, children were better able to complete the circuit challenges and provided more causal explanations for how the completed challenges worked when they had experience playing with the circuit blocks with their parent. Overall, these data suggest that parent–child interaction during a STEM activity relates to both children's engagement and performance on challenges related to that activity. 

We examined how 5- to 8-year-olds ( N = 51; M_age= 83 months; 27 female, 24 male; 69% White, 12% Black/African American, 8% Asian/Asian American, 6% Hispanic, 6% not reported) and adults ( N = 18; M_age= 20.13 years; 11 female, 7 male) accepted or rejected different distributions of resources between themselves and others. We used a reach-tracking method to track finger movement in 3D space over time. This allowed us to dissociate two inhibitory processes. One involved pausing motor responses to detect conflict between observed information and how participants thought resources should be divided; the other involved resolving the conflict between the response and the alternative. Reasoning about disadvantageous inequities involved more of the first system, and this was stable across development. Reasoning about advantageous inequities involved more of the second system and showed more of a developmental progression. Generally, reach tracking offers an on-line measure of inhibitory control for the study of cognition. 

Abstract This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One‐hundred‐nine parent–child dyads (3–6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian‐American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported) played at an air flow exhibit with a nonobvious causal mechanism. Children's causal reasoning was probed afterward. The timing of parents' explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors was related to children's systematic exploration during play. Children's exploratory behavior, and parents' goal setting during play, were related to children's subsequent causal reasoning. These findings support the hypothesis that children's exploration is related to both internal learning processes and external social scaffolding. 

One way children are remarkable learners is that they learn from others. Critically, children are selective when assessing from whom to learn, particularly in the domain of word learning. We conducted an analysis of children’s selective word learning, reviewing 63 papers on 6,525 participants. Children’s ability to engage in selective word learning appeared to be present in the youngest samples surveyed. Their more metacognitive understanding that epistemic competence indicates reliability or that others are good sources of knowledge has more of a developmental trajectory. We also found that various methodological factors used to assess children influence performance. We conclude with a synthesis of theoretical accounts of how children learn from others. 

This study examined how inferences about epistemic competence and generalized labeling errors influence children’s selective word learning. Three‐ to 4‐year‐olds (N = 128) learned words from informants who asked questions about objects, mentioning either correct or incorrect labels. Such questions do not convey stark differences in informants’ epistemic competence. Inaccurate labels, however, generate error signals that can lead to weaker encoding of novel information. Preschoolers retained novel labels from both informants but were slower to respond in the Inaccurate Labeler condition. When the test procedure was not sensitive to the strength of information encoding, children performed above chance in both conditions and their response times did not differ. These results suggest that epistemic‐level inferences and error generalizations influence preschoolers’ selective word learning concurrently.