Understanding others' perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement…

Relatively few studies have directly examined children's memory of object-based spatial structure of room-sized environments. The current study investigated how children remember the spatial structure of a room, and the role of pictorial working memory (WM) and different testing perspectives in this process. In Experiment 1, 80 children aged 5 to…

It has been debated whether the progressive emergence of theory of mind (ToM) in autistic children is compatible with a "delayed" or "different" development model, and whether and how the sequential consolidation of ToM concepts is subject to cross-cultural variations in autistic and typically developing (TD) children. To study…

Parent-child reminiscing talk about positive and negative events provides children with unique opportunities to develop emotion competence. Very little work has involved families from low-income households and ethnically diverse backgrounds. We examined: 1) event valence (positive vs. negative) and ethnic differences in mother-child reminiscing…

Understanding others' perceptions is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Children's construal of visual perception is well investigated, but there is little work on children's understanding of others' auditory perception. The current study assesses toddlers' recognition that producing different sounds can affect others…

Young children are remarkably compliant with social norms, especially those governing fairness and equality. Yet children also frequently observe and face opportunities to violate those social norms, particularly in situations in which doing so is self-beneficial. In 3 studies, we investigated the conditions under which children adhere to social…

This study examined the play of 4-year-old children with a forest diorama that included toy representations of plants and animals. To examine the potential role of culture and expertise in diorama play, children from 3 samples participated: rural Native American, urban Native American, and urban non-Native American. Children's playtime was divided…

Sibling relationships are argued to offer a rich social context for the development of young children's theory of mind (ToM). There is evidence that the presence of siblings, particularly older siblings, may promote preschoolers' ToM, but it has not been investigated among toddlers. This study evaluated differences in early manifestations of ToM…

It is usually accepted that the binding of what, where, and when is a central component of young children's and animals' nonconceptual episodic abilities. We argue that additionally binding self-in-past (what-where-when-"who") adds a crucial conceptual requirement, and we ask when it becomes possible and what its cognitive correlates…

A critical skill in emergent writing is the developing ability to take the perspective of different readers; however, the precursors of this skill have not yet been identified. In this longitudinal study, 105 children (90 after attrition) were tested at 3 time points: pre-kindergarten (3-4 years old, n = 105), kindergarten (5 years old, n = 97),…

Recent studies suggest that there appears to be a similar developmental sequence in the understanding of mental states in both internal-state language and in standard theory-of-mind tasks. These findings suggest possible developmental relations between children's ability to talk and think about the mind. Two experiments investigated the concurrent…

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…