Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often struggle with making inductive generalizations. Yet for typically developing children, the capacity to make such generalizations is a hallmark of human learning. This ability requires some understanding of “intuitive statistics” (i.e., the understanding that there is a relationship between samples and populations), which have been previously demonstrated to emerge early on in infancy. We hypothesized that the challenges with inductive generalization among the ASD population may have its roots in weaknesses in probabilistic reasoning. In the current study, we gave children with ASD a probability prediction task adapted from the method used with infants in Teglas et al. (2007), and our results over two experiments with two groups (one from the U.S. and one from Singapore) suggest that compared with typically developing children, children with autism may have difficulties in engaging in probabilistic reason

Can children of all age groups engage in self-directed learning? While active learning has been widely advocated in education, it remains unclear whether its benefits apply to children at all developmental levels. In the present study, we demonstrate that 19-month-old toddlers acquire higher-order generalizations in the causal domain only when their play is facilitated by an adult experimenter or a parent, and not when they are provided with full instruction or complete free play. These findings stand in contrast with earlier findings that 36- month-old children can learn effectively from data they generate by themselves under conditions of complete free play. This difference suggests that the ability to engage in self-directed learning may develop over early childhood.

Rational constructivism believes children are active learners, they are able to learn causal rules through free play. Empir-ical evidence has demonstrated that 2- and 3-year-old children successfully identified causality and acquired higher-ordergeneralizations using self-generated evidence during free play, and their performances were same as in didactic learn-ing(Sim & Xu, 2017). However, if this conclusion is true across cultures? In the current study, we used the same methodsand found that 2.5- to 4-year-old Chinese children could also acquire higher-order generalizations under two differentlearning conditions, but their performances were better in the didactic condition than that in the free play condition. Oneof the reasons affected childrens learning is parenting styles, but only in the free play condition: children with authoritativeparents performed significantly better than children with authoritarian parents.

Human learners ask questions, manipulate objects, and perform interventions on their environment. These behaviors are true of adults, but even more so for young children. Recent studies have demonstrated that adults learn better under conditions of selection learning, where they can make decisions about the information they wish to acquire, as compared to reception learning, where they merely observe data that happens to be available to them. Yet to date, it remains unclear whether this advantage is available to children, and if so, does it arise because children can gather data in a non-random way? In the current study, we show that 7-year-old children show superior learning under conditions of selection in a category-learning task, and that their information gathering is systematically driven by uncertainty

It is commonly believed that children are able to learn through play. Recent studies have found that children are able to learn causal rules through free play (Sim & Xu, in press). One such study found that children learned how to correctly activate machines, using either a block that was the same shape or the same color as the machine, when given five minutes to play with them. However, would children be able to learn a more complex causal rule through free play as well and would their performance be comparable to children who were didactically taught the same causal rule? In the current study, we show that children are able to learn more complex causal rules through free play. We also show that children perform significantly better when learning these rules through free play or by first engaging in free play and then observing, as opposed to solely through observation.