This research examined the effects of overhearing an adult praise an unseen child for not needing to work hard on an academic task. Five-year-old Han Chinese children (total N = 270 across three studies; 135 boys, collected 2020-2021) who heard this low effort praise tended to devalue effort relative to a baseline condition in which the overheard…

Studies with adults suggest that implicit preferences favoring White versus Black individuals can be reduced through exposure to positive Black exemplars. However, it remains unclear whether developmental differences exist in the capacity for these biases to be changed. This study included 369 children and examined whether their implicit racial…

Teaching supports the high-fidelity transmission of knowledge and skills. This study examined similarities and differences in caregiver teaching practices in the United States and Vanuatu (N = 125 caregiver and 3- to 8-year-old child pairs) during a collaborative problem-solving task. Caregivers used diverse verbal and nonverbal teaching practices…

In laboratory studies, praising children's effort encourages them to adopt incremental motivational frameworks--they believe ability is malleable, attribute success to hard work, enjoy challenges, and generate strategies for improvement. In contrast, praising children's inherent abilities encourages them to adopt fixed-ability…

Subjects were six normal infants whose kicks were or were not reinforced. Examines how the temporal structure of kicking changed when infants learned a mobile task. Quantifies amplitude changes in spontaneous kicks versus those used operantly, and investigates whether reinforcement makes kicking more "efficient" through reducing…

In human infancy, 2 criteria for intentional communication are (a) persistence in and (b) elaboration of communication when initial attempts to communicate fail. Twenty-nine chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were presented with both desirable (a banana) and undesirable food (commercial primate chow). Three conditions were administered: (a) the banana…

Monolingual children were assigned to two groups to examine the role of reinforcement in language acquisition. One group was differentially reinforced for use of foreign vocabulary. The other group was first reinforced nondifferentially for use of either native or foreign language and later differentially reinforced for foreign language use. (PCB)

To investigate the effects of instrumental eating on food preferences, 45 preschool children were assigned to either instrumental eating or control conditions. Preference data obtained before and after a series of snack sessions (consisting of milk beverages) demonstrated a significant negative shift in preference for the instrumental groups.…

Three experiments analyze correspondence training as a chain of five events consisting of a promise, a series of behaviors leading from the promise to its nonverbal fulfillment (called "intermediate behavior"), a nonverbal behavior that fulfills the promise, a verbal report, and a nonverbal (or reported) behavior. Eight three- to…