In communicative situations, preschoolers use shared knowledge, or "common ground," to guide their interpretation of a speaker's referential intent. Using eye-tracking measures, this study investigated the time course of 4-year-olds' (n = 95) use of two different speakers' perspectives and assessed how individual differences in this…

Four- to 10-year-olds' and adults' (N = 263) ability to inhibit privileged knowledge and simulate a naïve perspective were examined. Participants viewed pictures that were then occluded aside from a small ambiguous part. They offered suggestions for how a naïve person might interpret the hidden pictures, as well as rated the probability…

Eighteen second-grade boys and girls identified as being high or low role-takers were videotaped teaching two same-sex kindergartners to make construction-paper caterpillars. High and low role-takers differed on eight dimensions of the 16 categories of prosocial behavior coded during videotaped observations. (Author/MP)

Examined individual differences among third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children (N=59) in the tendency to remember and utilize dispositional as opposed to situational information in predicting and explaining the behavior of story characters. (JMB)

This study examined demographic and individual difference variables that predicted level of Brazilian adolescents' prosocial moral judgment and self-reported prosocial behavior; it also tested mediating or moderating relations among predictors. Findings generally were consistent with contention that tendency to take others' perspectives and to…

A total of 50 children were observed at home at 33 months of age and then tested at 40 months on affective labeling, perspective taking, and false belief tasks. Individual differences at 40 months were associated with family discourse about feelings and causality at 33 months, verbal fluency of mother and child, and sibling cooperation. (BC)

Examined preschoolers' and second and fifth graders' development of two types of perspective taking: (1) perspective taking based on differences in the information available to two people; and (2) perspective taking based on differences in weighting the same information. (RH)