As adults, we intuitively understand how others' goals influence their information-seeking preferences. For example, you might recommend a dense book full of mechanistic details to someone trying to learn about a topic in-depth, but a more lighthearted book filled with surprising stories to someone seeking entertainment. Moreover, you might do…

Adults and children easily distinguish between fine-grained variations in trustworthiness intensity based on facial appearance, but the developmental origins of this fundamental social skill are still debated. Using a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) oddball paradigm coupled with electroencephalographic (EEG) recording, we investigated…

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…

Who do children trust? We investigated the extent to which children use face-based versus behavior-based cues when deciding whom to trust in a multiturn economic trust game. Children's (N = 42; aged 8 to 10 years; 31 females; predominantly White) trust decisions were informed by an interaction between face-based and behavior-based cues to…

Recently, several studies have suggested that metacognition emerges early in infancy and toddlerhood. However, to date, the developmental trajectory of these early metacognitive monitoring and control processes and their influence on children's later memory functioning remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to longitudinally document…

During everyday conversations, young children are often challenged with the task of correctly identifying the referent of novel words. What is their primary aim when they try to do so? We propose that by being motivated to successfully participate in communicative interactions, children primarily aim at comprehending what the speaker intends to…

Language that uses noun labels and generic descriptions to discuss people who do science (e.g., "Let's be scientists! Scientists discover new things") signals to children that "scientists" is a distinctive category. This identity-focused language promotes essentialist beliefs and leads to disengagement from science among young…

Infants avoid touching plants. Here we examine for the first time whether infants are also reluctant to touch plant foods. We hypothesized that infants would avoid plant foods because food neophobia--the avoidance of novel foods--is particularly strong for fruits and vegetables. However, we predicted that infants would avoid processed plant foods…

Although it has long been known that time is a cue to causation, recent work with adults has demonstrated that causality can also influence the experience of time. In "causal reordering" (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2013, 2016) adults tend to report the causally consistent order of events rather than the correct temporal order. However,…

Why do some children feel happy about violating ethical norms whereas others feel guilty? This study examined whether children's attention to two types of competing cues during hypothetical transgressions related to their subsequent emotions. Eye tracking was used to test whether attending to other-oriented cues (i.e., a victim's face) versus…

To successfully navigate an uncertain world, one has to learn the relationship between cues (e.g., wind speed, atmospheric pressure) and outcomes (e.g., rain). When learning, it is possible to actively manipulate the cue values to test hypotheses about this relationship directly. Across two studies, we investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds actively…

Previous research has found that even young children accurately assign wealth labels (e.g., rich or poor) to real-world wealth symbols, such as pictures of houses. However, it is unclear whether children spontaneously consider individuals' wealth status when predicting how they will behave toward others. In Study 1, children (n = 100, ages 4-5 and…

Some work demonstrates toddlers show preferences in targets of their prosocial behavior, and a number of theorists have argued that young children become increasingly likely to direct their prosocial behavior to ingroup over outgroup targets with development. The goal of this study was to examine whether toddlers' early helping, sharing, and…

Children's drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across childhood. What are the major factors that drive developmental changes in children's drawings? To what degree are children's drawings a product of their changing internal category representations versus limited by their visuomotor abilities or their…

Learning always happens from input that contains multiple structures and multiple sources of variability. Though infants possess learning mechanisms to locate structure in the world, lab-based experiments have rarely probed how infants contend with input that contains many different structures and cues. Two experiments explored infants' use of two…