Defining developmental progressions can be an important step in identifying developmental precursors and mechanisms of change, within and across areas of reasoning. In one exploratory study, we examine whether the development of children's thinking about ownership follows a systematic progression wherein some components emerge reliably before…

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have…

When faced with entities with potentially ambiguous category membership, adult category judgments are strongly biased toward dangerous and distinctive properties. For example, a cyanide-water mixture is categorized as cyanide. We used a developmental approach to better understand this cross-domain effect, which we term the asymmetric…

This study examined how children's and adolescents' beliefs about the distribution of wealth in society and the fairness of economic systems informed their behavior, judgments, and reasoning about access to opportunities among peers. The sample included 136 8- to 14-year-olds (47% girls, 60% White, majority middle- to higher-socioeconomic status…

To acquire social conventional knowledge, children must distinguish between behaviors that are practiced by groups of people versus those that are practiced by individuals. How do children infer the scope (i.e., level of generality) of social behavior? Prior work has addressed this question by focusing on the cues or instruction that adults…

Participants ranging in age from 3 to 98 years (N = 708; approximately 60% female; 49% Caucasian, 38% Asian; 12% Other ethnicities, 1% Indigenous; modal household income > $80,000) completed a battery of tasks involving verbal ability, executive function, and perspective-taking. Wherever possible, all participants completed the same version of…

We examined the influence of prior expectations on 4- to 10-year-olds' and adults' preferences and emotions following an undesirable outcome (N = 205; 49% female, 51% male; 6% Asian, 1% Black, 13% Hispanic/Latino [non-White], 57% White, 18% multiracial, and 5% another race/ethnicity; 75% with a college-educated parent). Participants attempted to…

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

Secrets carry valuable social information. Because the content of secrets can be damaging to the secret-keeper's reputation, people should only disclose their secrets to people whom they trust. Therefore, tracking which people know each other's secrets can be used as cue of social relationships: If one person tells another person a secret, those…

The current study investigated whether children understand the conditions under which another agent would hold uncertain knowledge resulting from inferential processes and, more importantly, whether children can make causal inferences about the relationship between the certainty of an agent's epistemic states and consequent behavioral strategies.…

Complexity is one of the major demands of adolescents' future life as adults. To investigate adolescents' competence development in applying problem-solving strategies in complex environments, we conducted a 2-wave longitudinal study in a sample of Finnish adolescents (11-17 years old; N = 1,959 at Time 1 and N = 1,690 at Time 2, 3 years later).…

The capacity to plan ahead and provide the means for future ends is an important part of human practical reasoning. When this capacity develops in ontogeny is the matter of an ongoing debate. In this study, 4- and 5-year-olds performed a future planning task in which they had to create the means (a picture of a particular object, e.g., a banana)…

The present study investigated age-related changes regarding children's (N = 136) conceptions of fairness and others' welfare in a merit-based resource allocation paradigm. To test whether children at 3- to 5-years-old and 6- to 8-years-old took others' welfare into account when dividing resources, in addition to merit and equality concerns,…

The present study investigated age-related changes in the intergroup allocation of resources depending on whether the ingroup norm was competitive or cooperative. Participants included children (M[subscript age] = 8.69), adolescents (M[subscript age] = 13.81), and adults (M[subscript age] = 20.89), (N = 263) who were inducted into simulated groups…

Research on distributive justice indicates that preschool-age children take issues of equity and merit into account when distributing desirable items, but that they often prefer to see desirable items allocated equally in third-party tasks. By contrast, less is known about the development of retributive justice. In a study with 4- to 10-year-old…