Examined effects of participation in an event on four and seven year olds' reports of the event. Results showed that participation lowered susceptibility to suggestion. Older children were less suggestible about actions that took place. Children showed high resistance to suggestions about actions that might be associated with abuse. (SH)

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…

Five experiments examined 15- and 18-month olds' sensitivity to morphosyntactic dependencies. Results indicated that 18-month olds, but not 15-month olds, were sensitive to basic relationship between "is" and "-ing" and that 18-month-olds could track relationships between functor morphemes. Findings were consistent with hypothesis that 18-month…

Examined whether use of statistical properties of syllable sequences is uniquely tied to linguistic materials for adults and 8-month olds. Found that both groups were able to segment a continuous non-linguistic auditory sequence or tone stream, with performance indistinguishable from that obtained from syllable streams. Results suggests that the…

Two studies explored relations between young children's peer social skills and theory of mind. Study 1 found positive, but moderate, zero-order correlations between false-belief measures and social skills, and false belief accounted for a significant amount of additional variance in social skills after covarying age and language measures. Study 2…

Three experiments explored 3- and 4-year olds' use of external representations. Results indicated that 4-year olds outperformed 3-year olds on self-recognition task; children performed better with photographs than drawings; a delay had no effect. Results suggested that assessments of self and other understanding may reflect children's ability to…

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…

The implications of three concepts from cognitive science for understanding of cognitive development are reviewed. These are (1) learning (and induction), (2) analogy, and (3) capacity. A model of analogical reasoning is discussed that specifies changes in representations over age that explain phenomena previously thought to be stage-related. (SLD)

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…

Four experiments assessed infants' ability to solve isomorphic problems and explored the nature of early representations. Found that 13-month-olds transferred a modeled strategy across isomorphic problems, whereas 10-month-olds transferred only after multiple source problems or high perceptual similarity between problems. Comprehension of the…

Examined in 4 experiments 2-year-olds' knowledge of solidity in search tasks. Found no evidence that 2-year-olds represented solidity and support constraints on trajectories of falling objects; two experiments included 2.5-year-olds who succeeded on search tasks. Explored implications of 2-year-olds' poor performance in light of very young…

Examined how 6- to 9-year-olds and adults judged expected value of complex gambles in which alternative outcomes had different prizes. Found that participants at all ages used multiplication rule for integrating probability and value of each individual outcome, and based judgment of overall expected value on alternative outcomes. Even youngest…

Three experiments assessed children's abilities to track behavioral, representational, and truth aspects of conventions. Three- and 4-year-olds recognized that conventional stipulations would change behavior, but not how stipulations might affect representations. Three- and 5-year-olds confused pretenses and conventions; 7-year-olds consistently…

Five experiments using the visual habitation paradigm with 158 infants demonstrated that these 10-month olds did not use property/kind information to establish representations of 2 numerically distinct objects, a finding that provided support for the object-first hypothesis. (SLD)