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Brandon M. Woo; Shari Liu; Elizabeth S. Spelke – Developmental Science, 2024
Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not…
Descriptors: Infants, Cognitive Processes, Inferences, Infant Behavior
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Liberman, Zoe; Gerdin, Emily; Kinzler, Katherine D.; Shaw, Alex – Developmental Science, 2020
Socially savvy individuals track what they know and what other people likely know, and they use this information to navigate the social world. We examine whether children expect people to have shared knowledge based on their social relationships (e.g., expecting friends to know each other's secrets, expecting members of the same cultural group to…
Descriptors: Children, Interpersonal Relationship, Logical Thinking, Age Differences
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Schwartz, Flora; Epinat-Duclos, Justine; Noveck, Ira; Prado, Jérôme – Developmental Science, 2018
Older interlocutors are more likely than younger ones to make pragmatic inferences, that is, inferences that go beyond the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence. Here we ask whether pragmatic development is associated with increased activity in brain structures associated with inference-making or in those associated with Theory of Mind. We…
Descriptors: Neurological Organization, Brain, Inferences, Cognitive Structures
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Gazes, Regina Paxton; Hampton, Robert R.; Lourenco, Stella F. – Developmental Science, 2017
It is surprising that there are inconsistent findings of transitive inference (TI) in young infants given that non-linguistic species succeed on TI tests. To conclusively test for TI in infants, we developed a task within the social domain, with which infants are known to show sophistication. We familiarized 10- to 13-month-olds (M = 11.53 months)…
Descriptors: Inferences, Infants, Control Groups, Tests
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Buttelmann, David; Call, Josep; Tomasello, Michael – Developmental Science, 2009
Although apes understand others' goals and perceptions, little is known about their understanding of others' emotional expressions. We conducted three studies following the general paradigm of Repacholi and colleagues (1997, 1998). In Study 1, a human reacted emotionally to the hidden contents of two boxes, after which the ape was allowed to…
Descriptors: Nonverbal Communication, Primatology, Animals, Emotional Response
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Daum, Moritz M.; Vuori, Maria T.; Prinz, Wolfgang; Aschersleben, Gisa – Developmental Science, 2009
The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6- and 9-month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement…
Descriptors: Familiarity, Infants, Cognitive Development, Video Technology
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Daum, Moritz M.; Prinz, Wolfgang; Aschersleben, Gisa – Developmental Science, 2008
Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…
Descriptors: Infants, Child Development, Developmental Stages, Goal Orientation
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Nelson, Deborah G. Kemler; Holt, Morghan B.; Egan, Louisa Chan – Developmental Science, 2004
In naming artifacts, do young children infer and reason about the intended functions of the objects? Participants between the ages of 2 and 4 years were shown two kinds of objects derived from familiar categories. One kind was damaged so as to undermine its usual function. The other kind was also dysfunctional, but made so by adding features that…
Descriptors: Toddlers, Classification, Inferences, Thinking Skills