Four experiments investigated infants' and adults' knowledge of the identity of objects in a causal sequence of events. In Experiments 1 and 2, 18- and 22-month-olds in the visual habituation procedure were shown a 3-step causal chain event in which the relation between an object's part (dynamic or static) and its causal role was either consistent…

Remembering to carry out intended actions in the future, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability. In daily life, individuals remember to perform future tasks that might rely on effortful processes (monitoring) but also habitual tasks that might rely on more automatic processes. The development of PM across childhood in…

Children showing poor executive functioning may not fully benefit from learning experiences at home and school and may lag behind in literacy skills. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of 276 kindergarten children. Executive functions and literacy skills were tested at about 61?months and again a year later. In line with earlier studies,…

Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

The ability to attribute mental states to others is crucial for social competency. To assess mentalizing abilities, in false-belief tasks participants attempt to identify an actor's belief about an object's location as opposed to the object's actual location. Passing this test on explicit measures is typically achieved by 4 years of age, but…

It is well established that 2-year-olds attribute a novel label to an object's global shape rather than local features (i.e., parts). Although recent studies have found that younger infants also attend to global rather than local features when given a label, the test stimuli in these experiments confounded parts and shape by varying both or…

In an examination guided by cognitive developmental and attribution theory of how explanations of wealth and poverty and perceptions of rich and poor people change with age and are interrelated, 6-, 10-, and 14-year-olds (N = 88) were asked for their causal attributions and trait judgments concerning a rich man and a poor man. First graders, like…

Attributional style models of depression in adults (Abramson et al. 1989, 1978) have been adapted for use with children; however, most applications do not consider that children's understanding of causal relations may be qualitatively different from that of adults. If children's causal attributions depend on children's level of cognitive…

Children's worlds are increasingly populated by intelligent technologies. This has raised a number of questions about the ways in which technology can change children's ideas about important concepts, like what it means to be alive or smart. In this study, we examined the impact of experience with intelligent technologies on children's ideas about…

Two experiments examined 6- to 11-year-olds' cognition about self- presentational behavior. Findings indicated that youngest children had difficulty in identifying self-presentational motives by story characters. Even with children who had mental-state reasoning skills required for understanding others' beliefs about the self, there remained…

Two experiments investigated the role of continuity cues in infants' perception of launching events as causal. Results indicated that younger subjects' perceptions of the particular object may influence perception of causality and that infants' use of cues to causality changes with age. (WP)

Two studies examined the positivity bias in children of different ages. Findings indicated that children from grade two and up selected the correct cause(s) when the effect covaried with only one cause, but only at a later age when covariation with two causes was presented. Ability estimations and expectation of success were more positive in…

The relation between past history of outcomes and achievement expectancies was examined for 72 elementary school students. (JMB)

The role of cognitive development in the formation of social judgments was investigated in 2 experiments examining children's use of task outcome information in attributional judgments of ability and task difficulty. (SB)

Two experiments examined the development of extended identity in children between 5 and 11 years. Findings indicated that only older children judged that they would be evaluated negatively through their association with a wrongdoer and that they would feel embarrassment. Responsibility for a younger child's actions was associated with an earlier…