It is often not apparent what people ought to do. Three experiments explored cues that children and adults may use to identify conventional obligations. Experiment 1 addressed the hypothesis that young children identify obligations with expected outcomes. Although preschool-aged (4-5 years) children often expected consistency, they and school-aged…

Although "hindsight bias" (the "I knew it all along" phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks…

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that the importance of linguistic labels for young children's conceptual organization stems from a privileged processing status of auditory input over visual input. Findings indicated that when auditory and visual stimuli were presented separately, 4-year-olds were likely to process both kinds of stimuli,…