Few studies on the development of forgiveness involved young children and adolescents, and very few involved samples from non-western countries. This study focused on the development of willingness to forgive a particular transgression in participants aged 4 to 12 years and from two different cultures: a South African culture (Mozambique) and a…

Previous research on children's knowledge about the mind has primarily focused on their comprehension of false beliefs, leaving the conceptualization of thoughts and thinking less explored. To address this gap, we developed a new assessment tool, the interview about the mind (IaM), to assess children's understanding of the mind. Two studies…

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…

The psychological mechanisms that subserve inductions about novel social categories in childhood are hotly debated. While research demonstrated that language, and in particular generic statements, plays a major role in how children learn to attribute properties to social categories, developmental theories propose other mechanisms. One theoretical…

Trajectories of cognitive and neural development suggest that, despite early emergence, the ability to extract environmental patterns changes across childhood. Here, 5- to 9-year-olds and adults (N = 211, 110 females, in a large Canadian city) completed a memory test assessing what they remembered after watching a stream of shape triplets: the…

A critical skill of childhood is learning social norms. We examine whether the generic pronouns "you" and "we," which frame information as applying to people in general rather than to a specific individual, facilitate this process. In one pre-registered experiment conducted online between 2020 and 2021, children 4- to…

We systematically compared beliefs about animal (e.g., "lion"), artifactual (e.g., "hammer"), and institutional (e.g., "police officer") categories, aiming to identify whether people draw different inferences about which categories are subjective and which are socially constituted. We conducted two studies with 270…

Across two studies, children ages 6-9 (N = 160, 82 boys, 78 girls; 75% White, 91% non-Hispanic) rated an inaccurate expert's knowledge and provided explanations for the expert's inaccurate statements. In Study 1, children's knowledge ratings decreased as he provided more inaccurate information. Ratings were predicted by age (i.e., older children…

Speech exhibits quasi-rhythmic regularities at multiple timescales, which seem to be crucial to comprehension. Both children's ability to extract rhythm from complex stimuli and to produce rhythmic patterns are known to undergo changes from infancy to adulthood. However, it remains unclear what rhythm skills specifically related to speech look…

Girls, more than boys, experience a decrease in the severity of autism symptoms during childhood. It is unclear, however, which specific autistic behaviors change more for girls than for boys. Trajectories of autism symptoms were evaluated using the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-calibrated severity scores (ADOS-CSS). Change in the…

This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate developmental changes in the efficiency of sustained, selective, and divided attention in a group of children aged 6-12 years by means of a computerized test battery. Participants included 199 children (51% female, majority White) who had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and no history of either…

Australian children aged 6-9 years (N = 120, 71 females; data collected in 2021-2022) were tasked with remembering the locations of 1, 3, 5, and 7 targets hidden under 25 cups on different trials. In the critical test phase, children were provided with a limited number of tokens to allocate across trials, which they could use to mark target…

How do children reason about academic performance across development? A classic view suggests children's intuitive theories in this domain undergo qualitative changes. According to this view, older children and adults consider both effort and skill as sources of performance (i.e., a "performance = effort + skill" theory), but younger…

Research has found mixed evidence for the production effect in childhood. Some studies have found a positive effect of production on word recognition and recall, while others have found the reverse. This paper takes a developmental approach to investigate the production effect. Children aged 2-6 years (n = 150) from a predominantly white…

Children's drawings of common object categories become dramatically more recognizable across childhood. What are the major factors that drive developmental changes in children's drawings? To what degree are children's drawings a product of their changing internal category representations versus limited by their visuomotor abilities or their…