While a wealth of research evidence has highlighted the significant impact of prosocial modeling on shaping children's sharing behavior, the mechanism underlying this effect remains less understood. Here we consider the goal contagion account whereby children recognize the prosocial "goal" of others' actions and these goals are…

Developmental science has experienced a vivid debate on whether young children prioritize goals over means in their prediction of others' actions. Influential developmental theories highlight the role of goal objects for action understanding. Yet, recent infant studies report evidence for the opposite. The empirical evidence is therefore…

Rule-guided behavior depends on the ability to strategically update and act on content held in working memory. Proactive and reactive control strategies were contrasted across two experiments using an adapted input/output gating paradigm (Neuron, 81, 2014 and 930). Behavioral accuracies of 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds were higher when a contextual cue…

Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal-directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but…

Self-regulation was found to be positively associated with school performance. Interrelations between self-regulation, working memory (WM), and achievement goals, in particular mastery goals, have been established, as well as associations with academic outcomes. It stands to reason that self-regulation, WM, achievement goals, and academic success…

Movement is prospective. It structures self-generated engagement with objects and social partners and is fundamental to children's learning and development. In autistic children, previous reports of differences in movement kinematics compared to neurotypical peers suggest that its prospective organisation might be disrupted. Here, we employed a…

Typically developing (TD) infants adapt to the social world in part by shifting the focus of their processing resources to the relevant aspects of a visual scene. Any impairment in visual orienting may therefore constrain learning and development in domains such as language. However, although something is known about visual orienting in infants at…

Throughout life, actions and language are inherent to social interactions. A long-standing research question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the interrelation between verbal and non-verbal forms of social interactions, that is, language and action. Perceiving "how" actions are performed and "why" they are performed in a…

The success of human culture depends on early emerging mechanisms of social learning, which include the ability to acquire opaque cultural knowledge through faithful imitation, as well as the ability to advance culture through flexible discovery of new means to goal attainment. This study explores whether this mixture of faithful imitation and…

In executing purposeful actions, adults select sufficient and necessary limbs. But infants often move goal-irrelevant limbs, suggesting a developmental process of motor specialization. Two experiments with 9- and 12-month-olds revealed gradual decreases in extraneous movements in non-acting limbs during unimanual actions. In Experiment 1,…

Naturalistic goal-directed behaviours require the engagement and maintenance of appropriate levels of cognitive control over relatively extended intervals of time. In two experiments, we examined preschool children's abilities to maintain top-down control throughout the course of a sequential task. Both 3- and 5-year-olds demonstrated good…

Human infants readily interpret others' actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent's future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants' goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the…

This commentary article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). Do 9-month-old infants construe the direct reach and grasp of a single object, sitting alone on a table, as a goal-directed action? Based on their current findings and a previous study, Hernik and Southgate (this issue) make the rather surprising suggestion…

This commentary article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). The author puts forward two points concerning the paper by Hernik and Southgate (this issue). She will discuss first how and why the converging findings of recent studies, including the one by Hernik and Southgate, extend knowledge about the nature of…

This reply article is to be published alongside: Hernik, M., & Southgate, V. (2012). This is a response to the commentaries on Hernik and Southgate (2012) by Biro (2012), Kuhlmeier and Robson (2012) and Luo and Choi (2012). Both L&C and K&R reject the authors' conclusion that an absence of a Woodward-effect in some single-object versions of the…