This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One-hundred-nine parent-child dyads (3-6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian-American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported)…

Research suggests that children can learn new information via pretense. However, a fundamental problem with existing studies is that children are passive receivers of the pretense rather than active, engaged participants. This preregistered study replicates previous learning from pretense findings (Sutherland & Friedman, 2012, "Child…

Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame-by-frame video analyses of spontaneous activity in two 2-h home visits with 13-month-old crawling infants and 13-, 18-, and 23-month-old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75%…

To study effects of the gender-packaging of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) toys, mother-child dyads (31 daughters; 30 sons; M = 5.2 years) were randomly assigned to play with a mechanical toy packaged for girls ("GoldieBlox") or boys ("BobbyBlox"). When familiarizing themselves with the toy to prepare…

Since Margaret Mead's field studies in the South Pacific a century ago, there has been the tacit understanding that as culture varies, so too must the socialization of children to become competent culture users and bearers. More recently, the work of anthropologists has been mined to find broader patterns that may be common to childhood across a…

Children acquire general knowledge about many kinds of things, but there are few known means by which this knowledge is acquired. In this article, it is proposed that children acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play. In Experiment 1, twenty-two 3- to 4-year-olds watched pretense in which a puppet represented a "nerp" (an unfamiliar…

In one of the first open diffusion experiments with young children, a tool-use task that afforded multiple methods to extract an enclosed reward and a child model habitually using one of these methods were introduced into different playgroups. Eighty-eight children, ranging in age from 2 years 8 months to 4 years 5 months, participated. Measures…

Investigates whether pretend play is an area of advanced understanding with reference to certain skills that are implicated in both pretend play and a theory of mind, including the ability to (1) represent one object as two things at once; (2) see one object as representing another; and (3) represent mental representations. (MDM)

Four experiments confirmed the widely accepted hypothesis that, although children as young as two engage in pretend play, even four and five year olds do not understand that pretending requires mental representation. Children appear to misconstrue pretense as its common external manifestations, such as actions, until at least age six. (MDM)