Emotional expressions are abundant in children's lives. What role do they play in children's causal inference and exploration? This study investigates whether preschool-aged children use others' emotional expressions to infer the presence of unknown causal functions and guide their exploration accordingly. Children (age: 3.0-4.9; N = 112, the…

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…

Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's…

Children rely on both evidence and prior knowledge to make physical causal inferences; this study explores whether they make attributions about others' behavior in the same manner. A total of one hundred and fifty-nine 4- and 6-year-olds saw 2 dolls interacting with 2 activities, and explained the dolls' actions. In the person condition, each doll…

Trait attribution is central to people's naive theories of people and their actions. Previous developmental research indicates that young children are poor at predicting behaviors from past trait-relevant behaviors. We propose that the cognitive process of behavior-to-behavior predictions consists of two component processes: (1) behavior-to-trait…

Three experiments examined the changes in category representation that take place when children use exemplars for tasks other than classification. In Experiments 1 and 2, 6- and 10-year-old children learned to classify exemplars of a novel category and then used the same exemplars in an inferential prediction task. In a subsequent classification…

Do young children appreciate the importance of access to premises when judging what another person knows? In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds (N=31) were sensitive to another person's access to premises when predicting that person's ability to point to a target after eliminating alternatives in a set of 3 cartoon characters. Experiment 2 replicated the…

Tested the hypothesis that in predicting future behavior of an actor, older children rely on trait inferences, whereas younger children rely on global, evaluative inferences. Found that 9- and 10-year-olds' behavioral predictions were mediated solely by trait ratings, whereas 5- and 6-year-olds' predictions were mediated by evaluative ratings. The…