Children hold rich essentialist beliefs about natural and social categories, representing them as discrete (mutually exclusive with sharp boundaries) and stable (with membership remaining constant over an individual’s lifespan). Children use essential categories to make inductive inferences about individuals. How do children determine what categories to consider essential and to use as an inductive

Between the ages of 3 and 5, children develop greater control over attention to visual dimensions. Children develop the ability to flexibly shift between visual dimensions and to selectively process specific dimensions of an object. Previous proposals have suggested that selective and flexible attention is developmentally related to one another. However, the relation between flexibility and selectivity

Children are known to accept communicated information, even when it contradicts their own judgments. Here, we explored the role of direct address and accuracy in children’s testimonial decisions and socio-moral evaluations of the speaker. After 4-year-old children (N = 100) gave baseline classification responses for four hybrid animals, an adult speaker either directly told the child information that

ABSTRACT Being connected to other people at the level of inner and unobservable mental states is one of the most essential aspects of a meaningful life, including psychological well-being and successful cooperation. The foundation for this kind of connectedness is our theory of mind (ToM), that is the ability to understand our own and others’ inner experiences in terms of mental states such as beliefs

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 (citation removed) and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and mathematical skills or have considered

The Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) has been used extensively to investigate children’s understanding of emotion. The present study aimed at investigating the TEC’s factorial structure, its measurement invariance across age and gender, and defining age-referred TEC scores, in a large sample of 1,478 children (755 males, 723 females) aged between 3 and 10 years. Confirmatory factor analysis of the

When hearing an object label, a specific object may come to mind. With the phrase, “There was a balloon in the pack/air” the representation of balloon varies based on the implied shape (deflated vs. inflated). The current study investigated whether the implied shape affects sentence-picture verification for adults and preschool children. Participants heard sentences and compared them to visual stimuli

The acquisition of theory of mind (ToM) – the ability to attribute mental states to explain others’ behaviors – is a critical milestone in children’s cognitive development. Previous research has established that deaf children experience significant delays in ToM compared to hearing children within the same culture. However, prior studies were restricted due to the reliance on work in deaf samples from

Children have repeatedly been shown to selectively prefer to learn from previously accurate informants rather than those who have been inaccurate in the past. However, the stability of individual differences in performance on such tasks has yet to be studied. We presented preschoolers with two identical selective learning tasks conducted one week apart (Study 1; N = 53) or two parallel selective learning

The four experiments reported here used the preferential looking and habituation paradigms to examine whether 5-month-olds possess a perceptual template for snakes, sharks, and rodents. It was predicted that if infants possess such a template then they would attend preferentially to schematic images of these non-human animal stimuli relative to scrambled versions of the same stimuli. The results reveal

Despite extant evidence of negative peer treatment of transgender adolescents and adults, little is known about how young children perceive transgender peers, particularly those who have socially-transitioned, or are living in line with their gender, rather than sex at birth. Whereas children have been shown to be averse to gender nonconformity in peers, because many transgender children appear and

What factors contribute to children's tendency to view individuals as having different traits and abilities? The present research tested whether young children are influenced by adults' nonverbal behaviors when making inferences about peers. In Study 1, participants (5-6 years) viewed multiple videos of interactions between a 'teacher' and two 'students;' all individuals were unfamiliar to participants

The study of executive function (EF) has become increasingly popular in multiple areas of research. A wealth of evidence has supported the value of EF in shaping notable outcomes across typical and atypical development; however, little evidence has supported the cognitive contributors to early EF development. The current study used data from a large longitudinal sample of healthy children to investigate

This research investigates the development of constraints in word learning. Previous experiments have shown that as infants gain more knowledge of native language structure, they become more selective about the forms that they accept as labels. However, the developmental pattern exhibited depends greatly on the way that infants are introduced to the labels and tested. In a series of experiments, we

Data from a large-scale, longitudinal research study with an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample were utilized to explore linkages between maternal elaborative conversational style and the development of children's autobiographical and deliberate memory. Assessments were made when the children were 3, 5, and 6 years of age, and the results reveal concurrent and longitudinal linkages between

Research has explored how multiracial individuals are categorized by monoracial individuals, but has not yet explored how they are categorized by multiracial individuals themselves. We examined how multiracial children (4-9 years) and adults categorized multiracial targets (presented with and without parentage information). When parentage information was provided, multiracial targets were more likely

In two studies we attempt to capture the information processing abilities underlying children's reality-status judgments. Forty 5- to 6-year-olds and 53 7- to 8-year-olds heard about novel entities (animals) that varied in their fit with children's world knowledge. After hearing about each entity, children could either guess reality status immediately or listen to testimony first. Informants varied

Typically developing (TD) children refer to objects uniquely in gesture (e.g., point at cat) before they produce verbal labels for these objects ("cat"; Bates et al., 1979). The onset of such gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words, showing a strong positive relation between early gestures and early words (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). We ask whether gesture plays the same door-opening

This study examined whether attention to a location plays a role in the maintenance of locations in spatial working memory in young children as it does in adults. This study was the first to investigate whether distractors presented during the delay of a spatial working memory task influenced young children's memory responses. Across two experiments, 3- and 6-year-olds completed a spatial working memory

In human children and adults, familiar face types-typically own-age and own-species faces-are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias, but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual attunement, which predicts advantages in discrimination for the

An important problem verb learners must solve is how to extend verbs. Children could use cross-situational information to guide their extensions, however comparing events is difficult. Two studies test whether children benefit from initially seeing a pair of similar events ('progressive alignment') while learning new verbs, and whether this influence changes with age. In Study 1, 2 ½- and 3 ½-year-old

Television can be a powerful education tool; however, content-makers must understand the factors that engage attention and promote learning from screen media. Prior research suggests that social engagement is critical for learning and that interactivity may enhance the educational quality of children's media. The present study examined the effects of increasing the social interactivity of television

How do toddlers learn the names of geometric forms? Past work suggests that preschoolers have fragmentary knowledge and that defining properties are not understood until well into elementary school. The current study investigates when children first begin to understand shape names and how they apply those labels to unusual instances. We tested 25- and 30-month-old children's (N = 30 each) understanding

From early in development, segmenting events unfolding in the world in meaningful ways renders input more manageable and facilitates interpretation and prediction. Yet, little is known about how children process action structure in events comprised of multiple coarse-grained actions. More importantly, little is known about the time-course of action processing in young children or about the specific

Summer slide, uneven growth of academic skills over the calendar year, captures the fact that the learning gains children make over the school year do not continue at the same pace over the summer, when children are typically not in school. We compared growth of reading skills during the school year and over the summer months in children with pre-or perinatal brain lesion (PL) and typically-developing

Research with preschool children shows that explanations are important to them in that they actively seek explanations in their conversations with adults. But, what sorts of explanations do they prefer, and what, if anything, do young children learn from the explanations they receive? Following a preliminary study with adults (N=67) to establish materials for use with children, we addressed this question

Recent studies indicate the need to investigate the sources of toddlers' understanding of another person's pretense. The present study is a cultural and longitudinal extension of the work of Lillard and Witherington (2004), who claimed that mothers modify their behaviors during pretense and that the some of these behavior modifications help their toddlers understand maternal pretense. Experiment 1

Head-mounted video cameras (with and without an eye camera to track gaze direction) are being increasingly used to study infants' and young children's visual environments and provide new and often unexpected insights about the visual world from a child's point of view. The challenge in using head cameras is principally conceptual and concerns the match between what these cameras measure and the research

Differences in vocabulary that children bring with them to school can be traced back to the gestures they produce at 1;2, which, in turn, can be traced back to the gestures their parents produce at the same age (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009b). We ask here whether child gesture can be experimentally increased and, if so, whether the increases lead to increases in spoken vocabulary. Fifteen children aged

The present research explores the role of inhibitory control in young preschoolers' pretense ability using an ego depletion paradigm. In Experiment 1 (N = 56), children's pretense ability was assessed either before or after participating in conflict inhibitory control or control tasks, and in Experiment 2 (N = 36), pretense ability was measured after children engaged in either conflict or delay inhibitory

Human visual object recognition is multifaceted, with several domains of expertise. Developmental relations between young children's letter recognition and their 3-dimensional object recognition abilities are implicated on several grounds but have received little research attention. Here, we ask how preschoolers' success in recognizing letters relates to their ability to recognize 3-dimensional objects

Adults attach special value to objects that link to notable people or events - authentic objects. We examined children's monetary evaluation of authentic objects, focusing on four kinds: celebrity possessions (e.g., Harry Potter's glasses), original creations (e.g., the very first teddy bear), personal possessions (e.g., your grandfather's baseball glove), and merely old items (e.g., an old chair)

Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called homesigns, that have many of the properties of natural language-the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built around the predicate-in particular, how manner and path are mapped

Although infants' cognitions about the world must be influenced by experience, little research has directly assessed the relation between everyday experience and infants' visual cognition in the laboratory. Eye-tracking procedures were used to measure 4-month-old infants' eye-movements as they visually investigated a series of images. Infants with pet experience (N = 27) directed a greater proportion

Map reading is unique to humans but present in people of diverse cultures, at ages as young as 4 years. Here we explore the nature and sources of this ability, asking both what geometric information young children use in maps and what non-symbolic systems are associated with their map-reading performance. Four-year-old children were given two tests of map-based navigation (placing an object within

Amid recent progress in cognitive development research, high-quality data resources are accumulating, and data sharing and secondary data analysis is becoming an increasingly valuable tool. Integrative data analysis (IDA) is an exciting analytical framework that can enhance secondary data analysis in powerful ways. IDA pools item level data across multiple studies to make inferences possible both within

This study was designed to investigate if the working memory profiles of children living in rural poverty are distinct from the working memory profiles of children living in urban poverty. Verbal and visuospatial working memory tasks were administered to sixth-grade students living in low-income rural, low-income urban, high-income rural, and high-income urban developmental contexts. Both low-income

Despite the well-established literature on explanation in early childhood, little is known about what constrains children's explanations. State change and negative outcomes were examined as potential explanatory biases in the domain of naïve biology, extending upon previous work in the domain of naïve physics. In two studies, preschool children (N = 70, 3- to 5-year-olds) were informed of the distinct

By the end of the first year, infants expect spoken labels to be extended across individuals and thus, seem to understand words as shared conventional forms. However, it is unknown whether infants' willingness to extend labels across individuals is constrained to familiar forms, such as spoken words, or whether infants can identify a broader range of symbols as potential conventions. The present study

Contrast information could be useful for verb learning, but few studies have examined children's ability to use this type of information. Contrast may be useful when children are told explicitly that different verbs apply, or when they hear two different verbs in a single context. Three studies examine children's attention to different types of contrast as they learn new verbs. Study 1 shows that 3

Understanding the actions of others depends on the insight that these actions are structured by intentional relations. In a number of conceptual domains, comparison with familiar instances has been shown to support children's and adults' ability to discern the relational structure of novel instances. Recent evidence suggests that this process supports infants' analysis of others' goal-directed actions

Developmental scientists have argued that the implementation of longitudinal methods is necessary for obtaining an accurate picture of the nature and sources of developmental change (Magnusson & Cairns, 1996; Morrison & Ornstein, 1996; Magnusson & Stattin, 2006). Developmentalists studying cognition have been relatively slow to embrace longitudinal research, and thus few exemplar studies have tracked

Age-related differences in episodic memory judgments assessing recall of fact information and the source of this information were examined. The role of executive function in supporting early episodic memory ability was also explored. Four- and 6-year-old children were taught 10 novel facts from two different sources (experimenter or puppet) and memory for both fact and source information was later

Traditional looking-time paradigms are often used to assess infants' attention to socio-cognitive phenomena, but the link between these laboratory scenarios and real-world interactions is unclear. The current study investigated hypothesized relations between traditional social-cognitive looking-time paradigms and their real-world counterparts in caregiver-infant social interaction. Seventy-five 10-

Neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) graduates, a group at risk for attention problems and ADHD, performed an intra-dimensional shift card sort at 34, 42, 51, and 60 months to assess executive function and to examine effects of individual risk factors. In the 'silly' game, children sorted cards (airplanes and dogs) so they were not the same as targets. In the 'same' game they did the opposite. Performance

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N= 48, ages 3-4) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete and strict, but the boundaries of other categories (artifact categories

Two studies examined young children's early understanding and evaluation of truth-telling and lying, and the role that factuality plays in their judgments. Study 1 (104 2- to 5-year-olds) found that even the youngest children reliably accepted true statements and rejected false statements, and that older children's ability to label true and false statements as "truth" and "lie" emerged in tandem with

Over the first decade of life there are marked improvements in mnemonic abilities. An important question from both a theoretical and applied perspective is the extent of continuity in the nature of memory over this period. The present longitudinal investigation examined declarative memory during the transition from toddlerhood to school-age using both experimental and standardized assessments. Results

Researchers have speculated that a number of factors likely predict the quality of reminiscing between preschool children and their mothers. This study was designed to investigate three such factors, including child temperament, maternal personality, and maternal caregiving representations. 70 mothers and their preschool children were recruited for the study. When the child was 42 months of age, mothers

Remembering the temporal information associated with personal past events is critical for autobiographical memory, yet we know relatively little about the development of this capacity. In the present research, we investigated temporal memory for naturally occurring personal events in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. Parents recorded unique events in which their children participated during a 4-month

A series of studies investigated White U.S. three- and four-year-old children's use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others' relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which children shared their own preferences for various

We examined the interactions between visual recognition memory, working memory, and categorization by examining 6-month-old infants' (N = 168) memory for individual items in a categorized list (e.g., images of dogs or cats). In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with 6 different cats or dogs, presented one at a time on a series of 15-s familiarization trials. When the test occurred immediately

Developmental research is enhanced by use of multiple methodologies for examining psychological processes. The electroencephalogram (EEG) is an efficient and relatively inexpensive method for the study of developmental changes in brain-behavior relations. In this review, we highlight some of the challenges for using EEG in cognitive development research. We also list best practices for incorporating

Infants learn from adults readily and cooperate with them spontaneously, but how do they select culturally appropriate teachers and collaborators? Building on evidence that children demonstrate social preferences for speakers of their native language, Experiment 1 presented 10-month-old infants with videotaped events in which a native and a foreign speaker introduced two different toys. When given

Personal narratives are integral to autobiographical memory and to identity, with coherent personal narratives being linked to positive developmental outcomes across the lifespan. In this article, we review the theoretical and empirical literature that sets the stage for a new lifespan model of personal narrative coherence. This new model integrates context, chronology, and theme as essential dimensions

In this study we assessed children's ability to use information overheard in other people's conversations to judge the reality status of a novel entity. Three- to 9-year-old children (N = 101) watched video clips in which two adults conversed casually about a novel being. Videos contained statements that either explicitly denied, explicitly affirmed, or implicitly acknowledged the entity's existence

Data collection can be the most time- and cost-intensive part of developmental research. This article describes some long-proposed but little-used research designs that have the potential to maximize data quality (reliability and validity) while minimizing research cost. In planned missing data designs, missing data are used strategically to improve the validity of data collection in one of two ways

A long history of research has considered the role of iconicity in language and the existence and role of non-arbitrary properties in language and the use of language. Previous studies with Japanese-speaking children whose language defines a large grammatical class of words with clear sound symbolism suggest that iconicity properties in Japanese may aid early verb learning, and a recent extended work