The purpose of present experiments with subjects approximately three, five, and seven years of age was to provide additional evidence for the obviousness of the generative transmission principle and to provide initial evidence for the secondary principles of absence and facility. Empirical support was found for each of these selection principles,…

A series of six experiments compares young children's competence in attributing absence of knowledge (ignorance) to their competence in attributing a false belief to the other. (HOD)

Examines developmental change in 4- 7- and 10-month-old infants' perceptions of correlations among attributes to determine whether relational information plays a role in abilities ranging from the perception and recognition of a simple pattern to the formation of a category. (HOD)

Examines how certain human brow and mouth gestures influence the attributions of social dominance made by children. Hypothesizes that stimulus photographs depicting adults with lowered-brow expressions or without smiles appear to be more dominant relative to photographs showing adults with raised-brow expressions or with smiles, respectively. (HOD)

Subjects of this study were 144 White, middle-class children in kindergarten, first, second, and fourth grades. Children were interviewed individually about their explanations for both academic and social outcomes and their evaluations of their own outcomes. Self-evaluations became less positive in both domains and less similar across domains with…

Examines the implications of temporal separation for children's developmental differences in inferences drawn about an individual's characteristics after observing multiple instances of that individual's behavior. Also tests two competing hypotheses about how young children process information separated in time. (HOD)