Children have traditionally been viewed as less reliable witnesses than are adults. More recently, a concept known as developmental reversals, has brought this view into question. Developmental reversals have demonstrated that in certain contexts, children produce fewer false memories than adults. The primary paradigm used to demonstrate…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

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…

Adults conceptualize God as particularly knowledgeable -- more knowledgeable than humans -- about moral transgressions. We investigated how younger (4- to 5-year-old) and older (6- to 7-year-old) children view God's moral knowledge. Cultural narratives in the United States portray God as omniscient, which could lead children growing up in the…

Research suggests that individual differences in math abilities correlate with approximate representations of quantity that are supported by a primitive Approximate Number System (ANS). However, relatively little research has addressed the direction of this association in early childhood. Here we examined the development of the ANS and math…

Children's lexical processing speed at 18 to 25 months of age has been linked to concurrent and later language abilities. In the current study, we extend this finding to children aged 36 months. Children (N = 126) participated in a lexical processing task in which they viewed two static images on noun trials (e.g., an ear of corn and a hat), or…

Although action experience has been shown to enhance the development of spatial cognition, the mechanism underlying the effects of action is still unclear. The present research examined the role of visual cues generated during action in promoting infants' mental rotation. We sought to clarify the underlying mechanism by decoupling different…

In human children and adults, familiar face types--typically own-age and own-species faces--are discriminated better than other face types; however, human infants do not appear to exhibit an own-age bias but instead better discriminate adult faces, which they see more often. There are two possible explanations for this pattern: Perceptual…

In the current research, we examined whether the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) could be successfully adapted as an implicit measure of children's attitudes. We tested this possibility in 3 studies with 5- to 10-year-old children. In Study 1, we found evidence that children misattribute affect elicited by attitudinally positive (e.g., cute…

To adult humans, the task of forming an impression of another social being seems effortless and even obligatory. In 2 experiments, we offer the first systematic cross-cultural examination of impression formation in European American and East Asian preschool children. Children across both cultures easily inferred basic personality traits, such as…

In simple rule-switching tests, 3- and 4-year-olds can follow each of two sorting rules but sometimes make perseverative errors when switching. Older children make few errors but respond slowly when switching. These age-related changes might reflect the maturation of executive functions (e.g., inhibition). However, they might also reflect…

The present study aims to examine relations between number representations and various sources of individual differences within early stages of development of number representations. The mental number line has been found to develop from a logarithmic to a more linear representation. Sources under investigation are counting skills and executive…

We investigated whether children's ability to deal with referentially opaque contexts could be predicted by both metarepresentational ability (false-belief understanding) and metalinguistic awareness (the ability to compare and evaluate statements containing referring expressions). Five- to 7-year-olds completed opacity, false-belief,…

This study investigated the relations among preschool children's ability to understand that other people see things differently than they do, that other people can believe things differently than the children know to be true, and that they can manipulate others' beliefs through intentional lying. Children between the ages of 3 and 5 were given…

To evaluate the claim that correct performance on unexpected transfer false-belief tasks specifically involves mental-state understanding, two experiments were carried out with children with autism, intellectual disabilities, and typical development. In both experiments, children were given a standard unexpected transfer false-belief task and a…