"What makes this a wug?" Relations among children's question asking, memory, and categorization of objects.

ABSTRACT: Children ask many questions, but do not always receive answers to the questions they ask. We were interested in whether the act of generating questions, in the absence of an answer, is related to children's later thinking. Two experiments examined whether children retain the questions they ask in working memory, and whether the type of questions asked relate to their categorization. Four to ten-year-old children (N = 42 in Experiment 1, N = 41 in Experiment 2) were shown 12 novel objects, asked three questions about each, and did not receive answers to their questions. Children recalled their questions in the first experiment and categorized variants of the novel objects in the second experiment. We found that children have robust working memory for their questions, indicatin

SUBMITTER: Lazaroff E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9403714 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature