The capacity to ascribe goals and intentions to others is a fundamental step in child cognitive development. The aim of the present study was to assess the age at which these capabilities are acquired in typically developing children. Two experiments were carried out. In the first experiment, 4 groups of children (age range = 3 years 2 months-7…

Recent research indicates that moral judgment and 1st-order theory of mind abilities are related. What is not known, however, is how 2nd-order theory of mind is related to moral judgment. In the present study, we extended previous findings by administering a morally relevant theory of mind task (an accidental transgressor) to 4- to 7-year-old…

The ability to both identify and explain others' intentional acts is fundamental for successful social interaction. In two cross-sectional studies, we investigated 3- to 9-year-olds' (n = 148) understanding of the folk concept of intentionality, using three types of intentionality measures. The relationship between this type of reasoning and false…

Ownership is not a "natural" property of objects, but is determined by human intentions. Facts about who owns what may be altered by appropriate decisions. However, young children often deny the efficacy of transfer decisions, asserting that original owners retain rights to their property. In Experiment 1, 4-5-year-old and 7-8-year-old children…

Prospective memory (PM) reflects the product of cognitive processes associated with the formation, retention, delayed initiation, and execution of intentions. It has been proposed that developmental changes in PM across the lifespan are heavily dependent upon the developmental trajectory of executive control functions. This study is the first to…

To date, little work has been done investigating prospective memory in children, particularly using a delay-execute paradigm. Two experiments were conducted to investigate this issue with children aged 5-11 years. While playing a computer driving game, children's ability to carry out a delayed intention either immediately a target cue appeared or…

The present study investigated event-based prospective memory in five age groups of preschoolers (i.e., 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds). Applying a laboratory-controlled prospective memory procedure, the data showed that event-based prospective memory performance improves across the preschool years, at least between 3 and 6 years of age. However,…

To assess children's understanding of intentions as distinct from desires, this study presented 3- to 7-year-olds and adults with situations in which intentions were satisfied but desires were not, or vice versa, in a story-comprehension task and target-hitting game. Findings indicated that younger children were unable to differentiate desires and…

Three experiments examined 3- to 6-year olds' ability to use a speaker's utterance based on false belief to identify which of several referents was intended. Found that many 4- to 5-year olds performed correctly only when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief. When the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance, many 3- to 6-year olds…

Five experiments tested whether children understand pretense intentions before they understand pretense mental representations. Findings revealed that children did not understand that intention is crucial to pretense. Various methodological factors that might have compromised results such as force choice versus yes-no questions or using a…

Maintains that Lillard's and Joseph's articles provide an example of how apparently divergent empirical results may turn out to reflect interesting differences between children and adults. The researchers agreed that for young children, pretense is often, but not necessarily, intentional and neither found evidence for a representational…

Studied 2-year olds' understanding of pretense expressions of independent agency in scenarios in which a doll acted as the agent of a series of pretend events. Found no gender differences in the doll's imaginary intentions, but older toddlers performed reliably better than younger. Episodes requiring enacting conclusions to events that began with…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…

Three studies explored the scope of preschoolers' teleological tendency to view entities as "designed for purposes." Found that preschoolers, unlike adults, tend to attribute functions to all kinds of objects. Both children and adults predominantly viewed an object's function as the activity it was designed to perform. (Author/KB)

Three experiments investigated use of vitalistic explanations for biological phenomena by 5- and 10-year-olds and by adults. Results replicated the original Japanese finding of vitalistic thinking among English-speaking 5-year-olds, identified the more active component of vitalism as a belief in the transfer of energy during biological processes,…