How do children evaluate complex causal events? This study investigates preschoolers' representation of "force dynamics" in causal scenes, asking whether (a) children understand how single and dual forces impact an object's movement and (b) this understanding varies across cause types (Cause, Enable, Prevent). Three-and-a half- to…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

Scale errors refer to behaviors where young children attempt to perform an action on an object that is too small to effectively accommodate the behavior. The goal of this study was to examine the frequency and characteristics of scale errors in everyday life. To do so, the researchers collected parental reports of children's (age range = 13-21…

Eight- to 12-month-olds might make A-not-B errors, knowing the object is in B but searching at A because of ancillary (attention, inhibitory, or motor memory) deficits, or they might genuinely believe the object is in A (conceptual deficit). This study examined how diligently infants searched for a hidden object they never found. An object was…

Examined word retrieval in 14- to 24-month-olds. Found that children with limited productive vocabularies were less likely to produce labels of hidden objects than children with larger vocabularies, even though all could name them and did well when asked to find them. Pictorial cues facilitated word retrieval. Naming errors peaked among children…