The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the…

Advanced theory-of-mind (AToM) development was investigated in three separate studies involving 82, 466, and 402 elementary school children (8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). Rasch and factor analyses assessed whether common conceptual development underlies higher-order false-belief understanding, social understanding, emotion recognition, and…

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)…

Children between the ages of 10 and 11 1/2 years were given a problem in interpersonal persuasion in either a practical or a hypothetical context. Children in the practical context exhibited higher levels of perspectivism than those in the hypothetical context. (JMB)

Examines the social, cognitive, and social-cognitive correlates of nonsocial play in 122 four-year-olds observed for 20 minutes during free play. Subjects were given a role-taking test and tests of social and impersonal problem-solving skills. Sociometric popularity and social competence, as rated by teachers, were also assessed. (Author/RH)

Role-taking, a prototypical social-cognitive skill, is the ability to view the world (including the self) from another's perspective. (Author/MB)

Evaluates fourth-to seventh-grade children on two aspects of social cognition: interpersonal understanding and means-ends problem-solving ability. Relates the two variables to sex, age, IQ, social class, and multiple dimensions of competence. Both variables significantly correlated with I.Q. while interpersonal understanding also correlated with…

Results indicate that socially maladjusted girls with histories of delinquency involving aggressive, disruptive, and antisocial behavior resulting in placement in institutional custody can, through training in social perspective-taking, increase their understanding of others in interpersonal situations. Subjects were 16 girls of 10-16 years of…

Primary aim: to test Edelstein, Keller, and Wahlen's model of sequential operations in perspective taking on 93 children in the third grade and 69 children in kindergarten, who were tested again when in the first grade. Secondary aim: to examine the relationship between social experience and perspective taking. (Author/BN)