Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

Although infants' cognitions about the world must be influenced by experience, little research has directly assessed the relation between everyday experience and infants' visual cognition in the laboratory. Eye-tracking procedures were used to measure 4-month-old infants' eye movements as they visually investigated a series of…

This research explores whether young children are sensitive to speaker gender when learning novel information from others. Four- and 6-year-olds ("N" = 144) chose between conflicting statements from a male versus a female speaker (Studies 1 and 3) or decided which speaker (male or female) they would ask (Study 2) when learning about the functions…

Recent studies have established that even infants can determine what others know based on previous visual experience. In the current study, we investigated whether 2-and 3-year-olds know what others know based on previous auditory experience. A child and an adult heard the sound of one object together, but only the child heard the sound of another…

Young children tend to judge improbable events to be impossible, yet there is variability across age and across individuals. Our study examined parent-child conversations about impossible and improbable events and links between parents' explanations about those events and children's possibility judgments in a reasoning task. Regression analyses…

Developing mechanisms for predicting human action is a critical task of early conceptual development. Three studies examined whether 4-year-old children (N = 149) use social allegiances to predict behavior, by testing whether they expect the experiences of social partners to influence individual action. After being exposed to a conflict between…

Two experiments were conducted to determine if infants attribute false beliefs to others when tested with the violation-of-expectancy procedure. In Experiment 1, the false-belief task was administered to 14- and 18-month-old infants. The procedure was identical to the one used by Onishi and Baillargeon (2005), except that two transparent boxes…

Children aged 3 to 8 years old and adults were tested on a reality–fantasy distinction task. They had to judge whether particular entities were real or fantastical, and response times were collected. We further manipulated whether the entity is a specific character or a generic fantastical entity. The results indicate that children, unlike adults,…

In this study the authors investigated whether children demonstrated the "underconfidence-with-practice" (UWP) effect. This effect is a highly robust metacognitive illusion in which adults become underconfident in their memory performance when asked to predict their memory for the same items across multiple study-test trials. One…

Most adults experience childhood amnesia: They have very few memories of events prior to 3 to 4 years of age. Nevertheless, some early memories are retained. Multiple factors likely are responsible for the survival of early childhood memories, including external representations such as videos, photographs, and conversations about past experiences,…

A series of studies investigated White U.S. 3- and 4-year-old children's use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others’ relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which…

This study investigates the importance of object function (action-object-outcome relations) on object individuation in infancy. Five experiments examined the ability of 9.5- and 12-month-old infants to individuate simple geometric objects in a manual search design. Experiments 1 through 4 (12-month-olds, N = 128) provided several combinations of…

A problematic issue for forensic interviewers is that young children provide limited information in response to open-ended recall questions. Although quantity of information is greater if children are asked more focused prompts and closed question types such as yes/no or forced choice questions, the quality of their responses is potentially…

Visual events are defined by a number of dimensions--their location in space, content (color, shape, etc.), and time tags (onset, duration, etc.). The role of time in infants' performance in the Visual Expectation Paradigm (VExP) was studied to evaluate whether infants encode in their expectation representation the timing of events in addition to…

Executive functions play an important role in cognitive development, and during the preschool years especially, children's performance is limited in tasks that demand flexibility in their behavior. We asked whether preschoolers would exhibit limitations when they are required to apply a general rule in the context of novel stimuli on every trial…