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…

We review and relate two literatures on the development of attention in children: one concerning flexible attention switching and the other concerning selective attention. The first is a growing literature on preschool children's performances in an attention-switching task indicating that children become more flexible in their attentional control…

Two experiments were conducted to explore the extent to which individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as well as young typically developing (TD) children, are explicitly aware of their own and others' intentions. In Experiment 1, participants with ASD were significantly less likely than age- and ability-matched comparison participants to…

Novelty seeking is viewed as adaptive, and novelty preferences in infancy predict cognitive performance into adulthood. Yet 7-month-olds prefer familiar stimuli to novel ones when searching for hidden objects, in contrast to their strong novelty preferences with visible objects (Shinskey & Munakata, 2005). According to a graded representations…

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal examination of syntactic skills, starting at the age of emergence of simple sentences and continuing through the emergence of complex sentences. We ask whether there is systematic variability among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds in the early stages of sentence production. The…

In a series of three experiments, we investigated the development of children's understanding of the similarities between photographs and their referents. Based on prior work on the development of analogical understanding (e.g. Gentner & Rattermann, 1991), we suggest that the appreciation of this relation involves multiple levels. Photographs…

An important issue in the field of clinical and developmental psychopathology is whether cognitive control processes, such as response inhibition, can be specifically enhanced by motivation. To determine whether non-social (i.e. monetary) and social (i.e. positive facial expressions) rewards are able to differentially improve response inhibition…

Recent research has shown that infants are sensitive to mispronunciations of words when tested using a preferential looking task. The results of these studies indicate that infants are able to access the phonological detail of words when engaged in lexical recognition. However, most of this work has focused on mispronunciations of consonants in…

What are the essential properties of human intelligence, currently unparalleled in its power relative to other biological forms and relative to artificial forms of intelligence? We suggest that answering this question depends critically on understanding developmental process. This paper considers three principles potentially essential to building…

Young human children at around 2 years of age fail to predict the correct location of an object when it is dropped from the top of an S-shape opaque tube. They search in the location just below the releasing point (Hood, 1995). This type of error, called a "gravity bias", has recently been reported in dogs and monkeys. In the present study, we…

Children rely extensively on others' testimony to learn about the world. However, they are not uniformly credulous toward other people. From an early age, children's reliance on testimony is tempered by selective trust in particular informants. Three- and 4-year-olds monitor the accuracy or knowledge of informants, including those that are…

Despite its considerable intellectual interest and great social relevance, religion has been neglected by contemporary developmental psychologists. But in the last few years, there has been an emerging body of research exploring children's grasp of certain universal religious ideas. Some recent findings suggest that two foundational aspects of…

The present study examined whether young children's behaviors in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting task can be influenced by their observation of another person performing the task. Experiment 1 showed that after children watched an adult sorting cards according to one rule, although the children were instructed to sort the cards according to a…

The auditory event-related potential (ERP) is obtained by averaging electrical impulses recorded from the scalp in response to repeated stimuli. Previous work has shown large differences between children, adolescents and adults in the late auditory ERP, raising the possibility that analysis of waveform shape might be useful as an index of brain…

The goal of this research was to assess children's beliefs about the reality status of storybook characters and events. In Experiment 1, 156 preschool age children heard realistic, fantastical, or religious stories, and their understanding of the reality status of the characters and events in the stories was assessed. Results revealed that…