Young children tend to behave more generously when their actions are identified than when they are anonymous, yet we know little about the cognitive foundations required for anonymity to impact generosity. In three studies we examined Canadian children's understanding of anonymity and its impact on sharing in anonymous and identified contexts.…

For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's…

Our ability to shift from current to alternative (e.g., past and future) perspectives (i.e., "self-projection") plays a fundamental role in accurate decision-making. We investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' ability to shift perspective to reason about their future and past preferences. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), children were presented…

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…

Numerous studies suggest that by elementary school, children have implicit and explicit gender stereotypes about the toys, activities, roles, and abilities associated with boys vs. girls. Furthermore, these stereotypes have been shown to affect children's goals and behaviors, leading them to pursue activities that are associated with their own…

Maternal and paternal teaching sequences directed to their preschool children in a naturalistic home environment were investigated. The sample included 37 middle-class sibling dyads, aged four and six, and both their mothers and fathers during ongoing interactions in the home for six 90-minute sessions. Sequences of parent-child teaching were…

There is now wide consensus that the quality of family relationships is involved in the development of child executive functioning (EF), a set of cognitive skills that bear critical importance for social and academic adjustment at school. This body of research has, however, focused almost exclusively on dyadic parent-child interactions and failed…

Four- to 11-year-old children were interviewed about 2 different sorts of memories in the same home visit: recent memories of highly salient and stressful events--namely, injuries serious enough to require hospital emergency room treatment--and their earliest memories. Injury memories were scored for amount of unique information, completeness…

Hala, Brown, McKay, and San Juan (2013) found that children as young as 2.5 years of age demonstrated high levels of accuracy when asked to recall whether they or the experimenter had carried out a particular action. In the research reported here, we examined the relation of early-emerging source monitoring to executive function abilities.…

Three- to 5-year-old children's knowledge that pictures have a representational function for others was investigated using a pictorial false-belief task. In Study 1, children passed the task at around 4 years old, and performance was correlated with standard false-belief and pictorial symbol tasks. In Study 2, the performance of children from two…

A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at 3 time points: pre-kindergarten (3-4 years old, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years old, n = 97),…

Children's observation of the given-new contract was tested with a task requiring children to provide novel, rather than known, information about an event to a listener. Study 1 revealed developmental differences in children's adherence to the contract: 4- and 5-year-olds showed better adherence to the contract than 3-year-olds. In Studies 2 and…