Elizabeth Lapidow

Journal Publications

Lapidow, E., Stein, A., Thomas, G., & Walker, C. M. (in press). Young children Use Causal Knowledge to Guide Question asking To Appear in: Child Development. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., Goddu, M., & Walker, C. M. (2025). Children’s Developing Ability to Predict Novel Outcomes from Variability Information Developmental Psychology. Advance Online Publication. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E. & Walker, C. M. (2024). Learners’ Causal Intuitions Explain Behavior in Control of Variables Tasks. Developmental Psychology. 60(12), 2258–2273. [ PDF ]

Wong, M., Choi, K., Barak, L., Lapidow, E., Austin, J., Shafto, P., & Bonawitz, E. (2024). Young Children’s Directed Question Asking in Preschool Classrooms. Behavioral Sciences, 14(9), 745. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., & Bonawitz, E. (2023). What’s in the Box? Preschoolers consider ambiguity, expected value, and information for future decisions in Explore-exploit tasks. Open Mind: discoveries in Cognitive Science, 7, 855-878. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., & Walker, C. M. (2022). Rethinking the “gap”: Self-directed learning in cognitive development and scientific reasoning. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, e1580. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., Killeen, I., & Walker, C. M. (2022). Learning to recognize uncertainty vs. recognizing uncertainty to learn: Confidence judgments and exploration decisions in preschoolers. Developmental Science, 00, 1-8. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., Tandon, T., Goddu, M., & Walker, C. M. (2021). A Tale of Three Platforms: Investigating preschoolers’ second-order inferences using in-person, Zoom, and Lookit methodologies. Frontiers in Psychology, 12:731404. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E. & Walker, C. M. (2020). Informative Experiments in Intuitive Science: Children select and learn from their own Causal Interventions. Cognition, 201, 104315. [ PDF ]

Book Chapters

Lapidow, E. & Walker, C. M. (2020). The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning. In: Childers J. (eds.).  Language and Concept Acquisition from Infancy through Childhood. Springer, Cham. [ PDF ]

Bonawitz, E. B., Bass, I., & Lapidow, E. S., (2018). Choosing to Learn: Evidence evaluation for active learning and teaching in early childhood. In: P. Ganea & M. Saylor (Eds.). Active Learning from Infancy to Childhood: Social Motivation, Cognition, and Linguistic Mechanisms. Springer International. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E. S., & Brown, A.D. (2015). Autobiographical memories in PTSD: A review. In: C. Martin, V. Patel, & V. Preedy (Eds.). Comprehensive Guide to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders. Springer. [ PDF ]

Conference Proceedings

Lapidow, E., & Denison, S. (2026). Absences & Alternatives: Reasoning about Causal Exceptions Resembles, but Not Explained by, Reasoning about Generics. Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., & Denison, S. (2025). Maybe She’ll Say Yes: How Young Learners Acquire and Apply Knowledge about Inconsistent Causal Relationships from Different Domains. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., Stein, A., & Walker, C. M. (2023). Children Use Causality as a guide to Question-Asking. Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., & Walker, C. M. (2022). Clarifying the causal logic of a classic Control of variables task. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., Goddu, M. K., & Walker, C. M. (2022). Reasoning from samples to populations; Children use Variability information to predict novel outcomes. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E., Killeen, I., & Walker, C. M. (2020). Exploration Decisions Precede and Improve Explicit Uncertainty Judgments in Preschoolers. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]

Lapidow, E. & Walker, C. M. (2019). Does the intuitive scientist conduct informative experiments?: Children’s early ability to select and learn from their own interventions. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]

Choi, K., Lapidow, E., Austin, J., Shafto, P. & Bonawitz, E. (2018) Preschoolers are more likely to direct questions to adults than to other children (or selves) during spontaneous conversational act. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [ PDF ]