Theories of social-cognitive development have attributed a foundational role to declarative joint attention. The present longitudinal study of 83 children, who were assessed on a battery of social-cognitive tasks at multiple measurement points from the age of 12 to 50 months, tested a predictive model of theory of mind (false-belief…

The relations among various spatial and mathematics skills were assessed in a cross-sectional study of 854 children from kindergarten, third, and sixth grades (i.e., 5 to 13 years of age). Children completed a battery of spatial mathematics tests and their scores were submitted to exploratory factor analyses both within and across domains. In the…

Examined the association between attachment and emotional understanding in 2.5- to 6-year olds. Found that age and attachment security predicted a child's aggregate score on emotional understanding tasks. When the score was separated by valence of the emotion, attachment security and age predicted a child's score for only emotions with negative…

In an attempt to validate the findings of other researchers regarding the development of conceptual perspective taking, this study used Taylor's (1988) 2-tiered model to examine development of perspective taking among 40 3- to 5-year-olds. Participating were 22 males and 18 females from English-speaking backgrounds attending a preschool in…

Investigated the relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior in preschool children. Found that both mental state understanding and emotion understanding were positively related to teacher ratings of social skills, behavioral observers' global ratings of social skills, and peer popularity. When language ability was…

Used a data analytic strategy that was novel to the M-space literature to examine the mental capacity prerequisites of social-cognitive development of 99 students in grades one, three, and five. Used a structural equations analysis to determine whether M-power was a significant predictor of role-taking development. (RH)

A total of 86 girls of 2 to 6 years completed Level 1 spatial and affective perspective-taking tasks. Results showed increasingly accurate performance with age. Task intercorrelations and factor analyses provided support for the coherence of the Level 1 perspective-taking construct. (Author/BB)