Recent research has shown that from early in development, children selectively form new beliefs in response to information supplied by others. However, little is known about the development of selective revision of existing beliefs in response to socially conveyed information. Such selective social belief revision has been extensively studied by…

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4.…

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more…

Research on object cognition in infancy suggests that children from (at latest) 1 year of age are capable of individuating objects according to property/kind information. It remains unclear from previous work, however, whether infants in such studies truly apply sortal (kind) concepts or whether they merely track objects on the basis of…

Existing evidence suggests that children, when they first pass standard theory-of-mind tasks, still fail to understand the essential aspectuality of beliefs and other propositional attitudes: such attitudes refer to objects only under specific aspects. Oedipus, for example, believes Yocaste (his mother) is beautiful, but this does not imply that…

Two studies investigated young 2- and 3-year-old Turkish children's developing understanding of normativity and freedom to act in games. As expected, children, especially 3-year-olds, protested more when there was a norm violation than when there was none. Surprisingly, however, no decrease in normative protest was observed even when the actor…

To become cooperative members of their cultural groups, developing children must follow their group's social norms. But young children are not just blind norm followers, they are also active norm enforcers, for example, protesting and correcting when someone plays a conventional game the "wrong" way. In two studies, we asked whether young children…

In two studies children's performance on tasks requiring the ascription of beliefs and desires was investigated in relation to their executive function. Study 1 (n = 80) showed that 3- and 4-year-olds were more proficient at ascribing subjective, mutually incompatible desires and desire-dependent emotions to two persons than they were at ascribing…

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a…

We investigated preschoolers' selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending previous research, children also selectively learned other kinds of acts--novel games--from…

Young children use and comprehend different kinds of speech acts from the beginning of their communicative development. But it is not clear how they understand the conventional and normative structure of such speech acts. In particular, imperative speech acts have a world-to-word direction of fit, such that their fulfillment means that the world…

It has been repeatedly shown that when asked to identify a protagonist's false belief on the basis of his false statement, English-speaking 3-year-olds dismiss the statement and fail to attribute to him a false belief. In the present studies, we tested 3-year-old Japanese children in a similar task, using false statements accompanied by…

In theory of mind research, there is a long standing dispute about whether children come to understand the subjectivity of both desires and beliefs at the same time (around age 4), or whether there is an asymmetry such that desires are understood earlier. To address this issue, 3-year olds' understanding of situations in which two persons have…