The ability to represent desires and intentions as two distinct mental states was investigated in patients with parietal (N = 8) and frontal (N = 6) lesions and in age-matched controls (N = 7). A task was used where the satisfaction of the desire and the fulfilment of the intention did not co-vary and were manipulated in a 2 x 2 set. In two…

Four studies used visual habituation to determine whether infants 5, 6, and 9 months old would attend to those aspects of action related to the actor's goals. Found that infants distinguish in their reasoning about human action and object motion. Findings suggest that by 6 months, infants encode actions of persons consistent with more developed…

Two studies examined the hypothesis that children rely on name representations, often indexed by shape, in their semantic representations. Results suggest that, although shape plays an important role in children's early naming, other factors are also important, including the mental state of the picture's creator (whether intentional or not).…

Three experiments examined 3- to 6-year olds' ability to use a speaker's utterance based on false belief to identify which of several referents was intended. Found that many 4- to 5-year olds performed correctly only when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief. When the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance, many 3- to 6-year olds…

Four experiments examined 6-year-olds' performance on intentionality stories and one false belief story. Children answered according to their own knowledge in an intentional context, even though they responded by choosing a picture to insert into a protagonist's thought bubble rather than reporting the belief verbally. Children could correctly…

Three studies explored the scope of preschoolers' teleological tendency to view entities as "designed for purposes." Found that preschoolers, unlike adults, tend to attribute functions to all kinds of objects. Both children and adults predominantly viewed an object's function as the activity it was designed to perform. (Author/KB)

Three experiments examined the relative importance of original function and current function in artifact categorization for young children and adults. It was concluded that 6-year-olds have begun to organize their understanding of artifacts around the notion of original function, whereas 4-year-olds have not. Data were examined in terms of how…

Examined how 3- and 5-year-olds and adults extend names for human-made artifacts. Found that even 3-year-olds were more likely to provide artifact names (e.g., "knife") when they believed objects were intentionally created and to provide material-based descriptions (e.g., "plastic") when they believed objects were accidentally…

Four studies examined whether 16-month-olds' responses to true/false utterances interacted with their knowledge of human agents. Findings suggested that infants are developing a critical conception of human speakers as truthful communicators and that infants understand that human speakers may provide uniquely useful information when a word fails…

Examined in four studies whether and when infants connect information about an actor's affect and perception to their action. Found that 12-month-olds, but not 8-month-olds, recognized that an actor was likely to grasp the object she had visually regarded with positive affect. Replicated findings with 12- and 14-month-olds and with several…