In word learning, learners need to identify the referent of words by leveraging the fact that the same word may co-occur with different sets of objects. This raises the question, what do children remember from "in the moment" that they can use for cross-situational learning? Furthermore, do children represent pictures of familiar animals…

The natural pedagogy hypothesis proposes that human infants preferentially attend to communicative signals from others, facilitating rapid cultural learning. In this view, sensitivity to such signals is a uniquely human adaptation and as such nonhuman animals should not produce or utilize these communicative signals. We test these evolutionary…

What are the origins of object permanence? Despite widespread interest in this question, methodological barriers have prevented detailed analysis of how experience shapes the development of object permanence in newborn organisms. Here, we introduce an automated controlled-rearing method for studying the emergence of object permanence in strictly…

When learning from others, human children tend to faithfully copy--or "overimitate"--the actions of a demonstrator, even when these actions are irrelevant for solving the task at hand. We investigate whether domesticated dogs ("Canis familiaris") and dingoes ("Canis dingo") share this tendency to overimitate in three…

The onset of intentional communication in children's first year of life represents a major milestone in human cognitive development. Similarly, it is well established that our closest living relatives, the great apes, communicate with signals characterized by at least first-order intentionality. Despite the well-documented influence of…

Sleep is known to support the neocortical consolidation of declarative memory, including the acquisition of new language. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by both sleep and language learning difficulties, but few studies have explored a potential connection between the two. Here, 54 children with and without ASD (matched on…

How long does it take for a newborn to recognize an object? Adults can recognize objects rapidly, but measuring object recognition speed in newborns has not previously been possible. Here we introduce an automated controlled-rearing method for measuring the speed of newborn object recognition in controlled visual worlds. We raised newborn chicks…

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and…

Human beings have remarkable skills of self-control, but the evolutionary origins of these skills are unknown. Here we compare children at 3 and 6 years of age with one of humans' two nearest relatives, chimpanzees, on a battery of reactivity and self-control tasks. Three-year-old children and chimpanzees were very similar in their abilities to…

Infants can see someone pointing to one of two buckets and infer that the toy they are seeking is hidden inside. Great apes do not succeed in this task, but, surprisingly, domestic dogs do. However, whether children and dogs understand these communicative acts in the same way is not yet known. To test this possibility, an experimenter did not…

Multiple hypotheses have been offered to explain the impaired face-processing behavior and the accompanying underlying disruptions in neural circuitry among individuals with autism. We explored the specificity of atypical face-processing activation and potential alterations to fusiform gyrus (FG) morphology as potential underlying mechanisms.…

Adult chimpanzees produce a unique vocal signal, the pant-grunt, when encountering higher-ranking group members. The behaviour is typically directed to a specific receiver and has thus been interpreted as a "greeting" signal. The alpha male obtains a large share of these calls, followed by the other adult males of the group. In this study, we…

Spatial cognition and memory are critical cognitive skills underlying foraging behaviors for all primates. While the emergence of these skills has been the focus of much research on human children, little is known about ontogenetic patterns shaping spatial cognition in other species. Comparative developmental studies of nonhuman apes can…

Object individuation was investigated in newborn domestic chicks. Chicks' spontaneous tendency to approach the larger group of familiar objects was exploited in a series of five experiments. In the first experiment newborn chicks were reared for 3 days with objects differing in either colour, shape or size. At test, each chick was presented with…

Flynn, Laland, Kendal and Kendal's article (this issue) plays a valuable role in two ways. First, it demonstrates how developmental psychology can learn lessons from the latest research on developmental niche construction within evolutionary biology. Secondly, for those psychologists whose main focus is the cognitive mechanisms by which humans…