When reasoning about a representation (e.g., a toy lion), children often engage in "iconic realism," whereby representations are reported to have properties of their real-life referents. The present studies examined an inverse difficulty that we dub "representational disregard": overlooking (i.e., disregarding) a…

When presented with a claim that contradicts their intuitions, do children seize opportunities to empirically verify such claims or do they simply acquiesce to what they have been told? To answer this question, we conducted a replication of Ronfard et al. (conducted in the People's Republic of China) in two countries with distinct religious and…

Engaging, focusing, and persisting in the completion of tasks are among the skills needed for school success. Tracking whether a child is learning cognitive problem-solving skills is essential in knowing if they are acquiring skills important for development and school readiness; and if not, how they are responding to early intervention. Use of…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate fine- and gross-motor development and basic cognitive skills in 3-18 month-olds in relation to home factors, age and weight. Three hundred and seventy mother-child dyads were recruited. For age, two groups were analyzed: 3-11 months and 12-18 months. Motor and basic cognitive skills were assessed using the…

Although children often believe an adult's claims, they may have opportunities to check these claims by gathering relevant empirical evidence themselves. Here, we examine whether children seize such opportunities, especially when the claim is counterintuitive. Chinese preschool and elementary schoolchildren were presented with five different-sized…

Longitudinal data were obtained from 157 children aged 3 years 3 months to 5 years 6 months at Time 1. At Time 2 these children had aged an average of 12 months. Theory of mind (ToM) and executive functioning (EF) were measured at both time points. Results suggest that Time 1 ToM scores predict Time 2 EF scores. Detailed examination of sibling…

A multitask battery tapping nonverbal memory and language skills was used to assess 60 children at 18, 24, and 30 months of age. Analyses focused on the degree to which language, working memory, and deliberate memory skills were linked concurrently to children's Elicited Imitation task performance and whether the patterns of association varied…

Two-year-old children's reasoning about the relation between their own and others' preferences was investigated across two studies. In Experiment 1, children first observed 2 actors display their individual preferences for various toys. Children were then asked to make inferences about new, visually inaccessible toys and books that were described…

Two experiments investigated how young children and adults understand whether objects are "by" a landmark and remember their locations. Three- and 4-year-old children and adults were asked to judge whether several blocks were "by" a landmark. The blocks were arranged so that their absolute and relative distances from the landmark varied. Later,…

This study provides evidence of sex-typed behavior in the spontaneous play of infants between 9 1/2 and 15 1/2 months. Eight boys and eight girls at 9 1/2, 11 1/2, 13 1/2, and 15 1/2 months were observed during 15 minutes of free play with a variety of realistic toys equally divided into male, female, and neutral categories. Stereotypical,…

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…

Many recent studies have explored young children's ability to use information from physical representations of space to guide search within the real world. In one commonly used procedure, children are asked to find a hidden toy in a room after observing a smaller toy being hidden in the analogous location in a scale model of the room.…

This study recorded the pretend play behavior of a total of 22 boys and girls aged 20 and 26 months to determine the effects of age, sex, toy type, and order of toy presentation on the amount of pretending observed during two home visits. Each visit consisted of three segments: two play episodes of 10 minutes each and an intervening segment of…

Explores age differences in children's conceptions of play, pretending, and toys. Examines parallel structural changes in other areas of development, such as language acquisition. Subjects for the study were 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children. (BD)

Normal infants were administered the Bayley Scales of Infant Development at 6 months and the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale at 3 years. At 6 months the quality of stimulation found in the early environment was measured. Results indicate that home environment may contribute to instability of performance on infant tests. (GO)