Future-oriented cognition (planning, prospective memory, episodic foresight, saving, and delay of gratification) involves a critical set of skills that children must develop for successful daily functioning. The current study developed the Children's Future Thinking Questionnaire (CFTQ), a parent-report on 3- to 7-year-olds' future-oriented…

There is inconsistent evidence that human bodies are processed through holistic processing as it has been widely reported for faces. To assess how configural and holistic processes may develop with age, we administered a visual body recognition task assessing the presence of body inversion and composite illusion effects to white adults (114…

Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes termed bias to trust in testimony, has primarily been studied in children preschool-age and younger, presumably…

This study examined the stability of three patterns of infant regulatory behavior identified in the face-to-face still-face (FFSF) paradigm at 3 and 9 months--social-positive oriented, distressed-inconsolable, and self-comfort oriented--and whether variations in infants' heart-rate were correlated with them. Although some studies have examined the…

Preschoolers use both direct observation of statistical data and informant testimony to learn causal relationships. Can children integrate information from these sources, especially when source reliability is uncertain? We investigate how children handle a conflict between what they hear and what they see. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were…

The main aims of this study were to further validate the Children's Social Understanding Scale (CSUS), which is a parent-report measure developed by Tahiroglu and colleagues, and to fill in some gaps in the existing research. Our study included more than 700 Polish parents from a diverse educational background who had children with disabilities,…

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is increasingly used in developmental research despite minimal evidence of whether children's IAT scores are reliable across time or predictive of behavior. When test-retest reliability and predictive validity have been assessed, the results have been mixed, and because these studies have differed on many…

The goal of the current study was to statistically evaluate the reliable scalability of a set of tasks designed to assess Theory of Mind (ToM) without language as a confounding variable. This tool might be useful to study ToM in populations where language is impaired or to study links between language and ToM. Low verbal versions of the ToM tasks…

This research investigates whether and how two fundamental environmental factors--harshness and unpredictability--interact in regulating child and adolescent development, informed by life-history theory and drawing on data from the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N =…

A large number of studies document that children differ in the degree they are shaped by their developmental context with some being more sensitive to environmental influences than others. Multiple theories suggest that "Environmental Sensitivity" is a common trait predicting the response to negative as well as positive exposures.…

Children's theory of mind (ToM) is typically measured with laboratory assessments of performance. Although these measures have generated a wealth of informative data concerning developmental progressions in ToM, they may be less useful as the sole source of information about individual differences in ToM and their relation to other facets of…

Studies show that children trust previously reliable sources over previously unreliable ones (e.g., Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004). However, it is unclear from these studies whether children rely on accuracy or conventionality to determine the reliability and, ultimately, the trustworthiness of a particular source. In the current study, 3- and…

We examined whether similarity, familiarity, and reliability cues guide children's learning and whether these cues are weighed differently with age. Three- to 5-year-olds (n = 184) met 2 informant puppets, 1 of which was similar (Experiment 1) or familiar (Experiment 2) to the participants. Initially, children's preference for either informant was…

The present study sought to investigate the family, individual, and dyad-specific contributions to observed cognitive sensitivity during family interactions. Moreover, the influence of cumulative risk on sensitivity at the aforementioned levels of the family was examined. Mothers and 2 children per family were observed interacting in a round robin…

Preschoolers, as a group, are highly attuned to causality, and this attunement is known to facilitate memory, learning, and problem solving. However, recent work reveals substantial individual variability in the strength of children's "causal stance," as demonstrated by their curiosity about and preference for new causal information. In…