As they learn to navigate the social world, children construct frameworks to interpret others' behavior. The present studies examined two such frameworks: a mentalistic framework, which construes behavior as driven by internal mental states; and a normative framework, which presumes people act in accordance with social norms. Participants included…

Recent work has probed the developmental mechanisms that promote fair sharing. This work investigated 2.5- to 5.5-year-olds' (N = 316; 52% female; 79% White; data collected 2016-2018) sharing behavior in relation to three cognitive correlates: number knowledge, working memory, and cognitive control. In contrast to working memory and cognitive…

This cross-sectional study explored the relationship between 24-hour movement behaviors and executive function (EF) in preschool children. A total of 426 Han Chinese preschoolers (231 males; 3.8 ± 0.6 years old) from Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, China were selected from October 2021 to December 2021. Accelerometers were used to measure physical…

To examine whether need for approval (NFA) and antisocial behavior (ASB) moderate the effects of socioemotional stimuli on cognitive control, 88 girls (M[subscript age] = 16.31 years; SD = 0.84; 65.9% White) completed a socioemotional Go/No-go and questionnaires. At high approach NFA, girls responded more slowly during appetitive than control (b =…

Four tasks (N = 191, 3- to 6-year-olds) examined the effect of instrumental versus conventional language cues on children's imitative fidelity of a necklace-making activity, their memory and transmission of the activity, and their perceptions of functional fixedness. Children in the conventional condition imitated with higher fidelity, transmitted…

This study examined executive control in sixty-two 5-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual using behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) measures. All children performed equivalently on simple response inhibition (gift delay), but bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on interference suppression and complex response…

This study examined differences in visual attention as a function of label learning from 6 to 9 months of age. Before and after 3 months of parent-directed storybook training with computer-generated novel objects, event-related potentials and visual fixations were recorded while infants viewed trained and untrained images (n = 23). Relative to a…

In accord with increasing recognition of the situation specificity of childhood social behaviors, individual and contextual differences in children's responses to potential peer conflict were examined (hostile attribution, behavioral strategies, and affective reactions; N = 367, 9-2 years, 197 girls). Situational cues from 2 sources, the…

Explaining inconsistency may serve as an important mechanism for driving the process of causal learning. But how might this process generate amended beliefs? One way that explaining inconsistency may promote discovery is by guiding exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior. In order to investigate this, a study with young children ranging in age…

Research connecting children's understanding of mental states to their peer relations at school remains scarce. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that children's understanding of mental states in the context of a faux pas--a social blunder involving unintentional insult--is associated with concurrent peer rejection. The present report…

This study relies on eye tracking technology to investigate how humans perceive others' feeding actions. Results demonstrate that 6-month-olds (n = 54) anticipate that food is brought to the mouth when observing an adult feeding herself with a spoon. Still, they fail to anticipate self-propelled (SP) spoons that move toward the mouth and manual…

The present study examined age differences in performance on the Tower of London, a measure of strategic planning, in a diverse sample of 890 individuals between the ages of 10 and 30. Although mature performance was attained by age 17 on relatively easy problems, performance on the hardest problems showed improvements into the early 20s.…

A large-scale ("N" = 552) controlled multivariate prospective 14-year longitudinal study of a developmental cascade embedded in a developmental system showed that information-processing efficiency in infancy (4 months), general mental development in toddlerhood (18 months), behavior difficulties in early childhood (36 months),…

This study examined parent-child emotion discourse, children's independent social information processing, and social skills outcomes in 146 families of 8-year-olds with and without developmental delays. Children's emergent social-cognitive understanding (internal state understanding, perspective taking, and causal reasoning and problem solving)…

This study explored the cognitive and behavioral profiles of children with working memory impairments. In an initial screening of 3,189 five- to eleven-year-olds, 308 were identified as having very low working memory scores. Cognitive skills (IQ, vocabulary, reading, and math), classroom behavior, and self-esteem were assessed. The majority of the…