Although stories for children often feature supernatural and fantastical events, children themselves often prefer realistic events when choosing what should happen in a story. In two experiments, we investigated whether 3- to 5-year-olds (total N = 240 from diverse backgrounds) might be more likely to include fantastical events in stories about…

Memory decision-making in 26- to 32-month-olds was investigated using visual-paired comparison paradigms, requiring toddlers to select familiar stimuli (Active condition) or view familiar and novel stimuli (Passive condition). In Experiment 1 (N = 108, 54.6% female, 62% White; replication N = 98), toddlers with higher accuracy in the Active…

Many studies have been conducted on the development of young children; however, not many have explored the cognitive processes of prereaders. The eye-tracker has been used with success to investigate the cognitive processes of young children abroad, but such studies are lacking in Malaysia. This study used an experimental procedure created with…

Current understanding of how culture relates to the development of children's gender-related peer preferences is limited. To investigate the role of societal acceptance of gender nonconformity, this study compared children from China and Thailand. Unlike China and other cultures where the conceptualization of gender as binary is broadly accepted,…

Research Findings: Reading e-books is becoming common even among toddlers, but we have limited understanding of how parents-toddlers reading e-books together compares to print books. To address the gap, we investigated interactions of 30 mother-toddler (12 months) dyads, in particular, mothers' language use, while reading both electronic and print…

Forming social evaluations of others is a core component of social cognition. In this study, the relationship between bilingual experience and social evaluations was investigated in 8-month-old infants. We compared monolingual and bilingual infants' responses to third-party interactions where characters performed prosocial and antisocial actions…

This study examined preschoolers' social inclusion--the active involvement of new partners into social interactions--in different intergroup contexts. Using an interactive paradigm, 3- to 5-year-old German children played a ball-tossing game with 2 puppets in which 1 puppet initiated the game with the child and another approached the game. In…

An ability to detect the common location of multisensory stimulation is essential for us to perceive a coherent environment, to represent the interface between the body and the external world, and to act on sensory information. Regarding the tactile environment "at hand", we need to represent somatosensory stimuli impinging on the skin…

This research investigated the effects of different pedagogical approaches on the learning of length measurement in kindergarten children. Specifically examined were the pedagogical approaches of guided instruction, center-based learning, and free exploration in the context of a play-based learning environment. This mixed design research was…

Infants' understanding of a pointing gesture represents a major milestone in their communicative development. The current consensus is that infants are not capable of following a pointing gesture until 9-12 months of age. In this article, we present evidence from 4- and 6-month-old infants challenging this conclusion. Infants were tested with…

We investigated the role of sociocultural (between-groups) and individual (within-group) factors on the development of preschoolers' resource-allocation preferences. We tested claims of the "joint impact hypothesis" of social values development that social-emotional understanding skills would predict the transition from simpler…

The developing infant learns about the physical and the social world by engaging with objects and with people. In the study reported here, we investigated the relationship between infants' interactions with the physical and the social world. Three-month-old infants were trained for 2 weeks and experienced either actively manipulating objects…

This study explored the impact of using best practices identified in previous studies in designing age-appropriate websites for middle and high school youth. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, 31 middle and 22 high school youth took part in six focus groups across four states. Participants were introduced to a website specifically designed for…

Findings highlight a general consideration for developmental research: namely, whether CA or MA is the more appropriate developmental parameter. (Authors)

A sequential-touching task was used to investigate whether 14-month-old infants can rapidly change how they categorize a set of objects, recognizing new groupings of objects they had previously categorized in a different way. When presented with a collection of objects that could be categorized by shape (balls vs. blocks) or material (soft vs.…