As children get older, they become better able to discriminate between impossible and improbable statements and they realize that improbable events can occur in reality while impossible ones cannot. However, when children hear about extraordinary events from fictional entities (e.g., popular characters from children's media), they may be more…

In four experiments, we investigate how the ability to detect irrelevant explanations develops. In Experiments 1 and 2, 4- to 8-year-olds and adults rated different types of explanations about "what makes cars go" individually, in the absence of a direct contrast. Each explanation was true and relevant (e.g., "Cars have engines that…

The ability to project oneself forward in time and imagine a future episode, known as episodic foresight (EpF), is an important aspect of future thinking. EpF tasks often involve children choosing an item for a future episode, yet the degree to which future projection is required to succeed -- versus memory or semantic associations -- has been…

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry…

Remembering to carry out intended actions in the future, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability. In daily life, individuals remember to perform future tasks that might rely on effortful processes (monitoring) but also habitual tasks that might rely on more automatic processes. The development of PM across childhood in…

Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children's inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children's ability to reason about the number of candidate causes…

Humans are motivated to connect with others and are sensitive to social exclusion--intentionally leaving out others. This ability to detect social exclusion is suggested to be evolutionarily adaptive, biologically hardwired, and an important feature of social-cognitive development. Yet it is unclear when children start to independently detect…

The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

In everyday life, we use folk theories about the mind and behavior to understand ourselves and others. An important part of our folk theory of mind is our intuitions about the role of the self in mental functioning--namely, whether the self is able to control each mental operation. The current study explored beliefs about the nature of control…

During the first 5 years of life, the versatility, breadth, and fidelity with which children imitate change dramatically. Currently, there is no model to explain what underlies such significant changes. To that end, the present study examined whether task-independent but domain-specific--elemental--imitation mechanism explains performance across…

In a previous study, Mix et al. (2016) reported that spatial skill and mathematics were composed of 2 highly correlated, domain-specific factors, with a few cross-domain loadings. The overall structure was consistent across grade (kindergarten, 3rd grade, 6th grade), but the cross-domain loadings varied with age. The present study sought to…

Hala, Brown, McKay, and San Juan (2013) found that children as young as 2.5 years of age demonstrated high levels of accuracy when asked to recall whether they or the experimenter had carried out a particular action. In the research reported here, we examined the relation of early-emerging source monitoring to executive function abilities.…

Remembering the temporal information associated with personal past events is critical for autobiographical memory, yet we know relatively little about the development of this capacity. In the present research, we investigated temporal memory for naturally occurring personal events in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. Parents recorded unique events…

The effects of language on symbolic functioning were examined using the "boxes task," a new symbolic understanding task based on DeLoache's model task. Children ("N" = 32; ages 2;4--3;8) observed an object being hidden in a stack of four boxes and were then asked to retrieve a similar object in the same location from a set of…

Contrast information could be useful for verb learning, but few studies have examined children's ability to use this type of information. Contrast may be useful when children are told explicitly that different verbs apply, or when they hear two different verbs in a single context. Three studies examine children's attention to different types of…