The current study is the first to provide a comprehensive examination of the activation--decision--construction model (Walczyk, Roper, Seemann, & Humphrey, 2003, 2009) in relation to young children's lie-telling and lie maintenance. Young children (3 to 4 years of age, N = 93) completed the temptation-resistance paradigm to elicit a…

Guided by evolutionary-developmental models, this study tested the hypothesis that children's exposure to parental relationship instability, defined by initiation and dissolution of caregiver intimate relationships, has both costs in cognitive impairments and benefits in enhanced learning skills. Participants included 243 mothers and their…

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a…

We propose a model linking the early parent-child mutually responsive orientation (MRO), children's temperament trait of effortful control, and their internalization of conduct rules. In a developmental chain, effortful control was posited as a mediator of the links between MRO and children's internalization. MRO was further posited as a moderator…

Guided primarily by life history theory, this study was designed to identify how and why early exposure to caregiver intimate relationship instability uniquely predicts children's externalizing symptoms in the context of other dimensions of unpredictability characterized by residential and parental job transitions. Participants included 243…

Preschoolers, as a group, are highly attuned to causality, and this attunement is known to facilitate memory, learning, and problem solving. However, recent work reveals substantial individual variability in the strength of children's "causal stance," as demonstrated by their curiosity about and preference for new causal information. In…

In a series of 4 experiments, we tested children's understanding that the causes of their actions must necessarily be attributed to information known prior to (i.e., "pre-action" information), rather than after (i.e., "post-action" information), the completion of their actions. For example, children were shown a dog, asked…

Language is rife with ambiguity. Do children and adults meet this challenge in similar ways? Recent work suggests that while adults resolve syntactic ambiguities by integrating a variety of cues, children are less sensitive to top-down evidence. We test whether this top-down insensitivity is specific to syntax or a general feature of children's…

Two studies tested hypotheses about the distinctive psychological consequences of children's patterns of responding to interparental conflict. In Study 1, 174 preschool children (M = 4.0 years) and their mothers participated in a cross-sectional design. In Study 2, 243 preschool children (M = 4.6 years) and their parents participated in 2 annual…

We often need to infer unknown properties of objects from observable ones, just like detectives must infer guilt from observable clues and behavior. But how do inferential processes change with age? We examined young and older adults' reliance on rule-based and similarity-based processes in an inference task that can be considered either a…

In a sample of 711 ethnically diverse adolescents, the observed interpersonal dynamics of dyadic adolescent friendship interactions were coded to predict early adulthood tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use. Deviant discussion content within the interactions was coded along with dyadic coregulation (i.e., interpersonal coordination, attention…

To locate objects in the environment, animals and humans use visual and nonvisual information. We were interested in children's ability to relocate an object on the basis of self-motion and local and distal color cues for orientation. Five- to 9-year-old children were tested on an object location memory task in which, between presentation and…

An intriguing error has been observed in toddlers presented with a 3-location search task involving invisible displacements of an object, namely, the C-not-B task. In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the dynamics of the attentional focus process that is suspected to be involved in this task. In Experiment 1, 2.5-year-old children were…

Performance on the task-switching paradigm is greatly affected by the amount of conflict between tasks. Compared to adults, children appear to be particularly influenced by this conflict, and this suggests that the ability to resolve interference between tasks improves with age. The authors used the task-switching paradigm to investigate how this…

What is the nature of learning to read Chinese across grade levels? This study tested 199 kindergartners, 172 second graders, and 165 fifth graders on 12 different tasks purportedly tapping constructs representing phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and subcharacter processing. Confirmatory factor analyses…