It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more…

Spatial play in early childhood is associated with a variety of spatial and cognitive skills. However, these associations are often derived from studies in which different tasks are used across different age ranges, leaving open the question of how children's natural behaviors during spatial play develop from infancy into the early preschool…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

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…

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 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…

Although much research has examined the development of orienting to social directional cues (e.g., eye gaze), little is known about the development of orienting to nonsocial directional cues, such as arrows. Arrow cues have been used in numerous studies as a means to study attentional orienting, but the development of children's understanding 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…

Recent studies indicate the need to investigate the sources of toddlers' understanding of another person's pretense. The present study is a cultural and longitudinal extension of the work of Lillard and Witherington (2004), who claimed that mothers modify their behaviors during pretense and that the some of these behavior modifications help their…

During the first decade of life, there are marked improvements in mnemonic abilities. An important question from both a theoretical and applied perspective is the extent of continuity in the nature of memory during this period. The present longitudinal investigation examined declarative memory during the transition from toddlerhood to school age…

Research on children's understanding of video has shown seeming contradictions. Fourteen-month-olds imitate actions seen on TV (Meltzoff, 1988) and 18-month-olds are reminded of an event by watching video (Sheffield & Hudson, 2003) but 24-month-olds fail at a video-mediated object-retrieval task requiring dual representational understanding…

Two-year-olds' appreciation of the shared nature of object labels versus object preferences was examined in 2 studies. A total of 128 24- to 27-month-olds played a finding game with an experimenter during which they were taught a piece of information about a target object in a nonostensive learning context. In Experiment 1, children were presented…