A food's visual features and testimony from others are important clues for children when making food choices. Children must integrate these two forms of information to make choices about food. The present study investigated children's food choices when these two clues are presented together. After confirming that children between the ages of…

A curious phenomenon in early social-cognitive development has been identified: Preschoolers deny that they can see others who cannot also see them (Russell, Gee, & Bullard, 2012). The exclusive focus on vision has suggested that this effect is limited to gaze, but children's negations might reflect a broader phenomenon that extends to vocal…

Developmental theory has long emphasized the importance of linking perception, cognition, and action. Techniques designed to record the spatial and temporal characteristics of hand movements (i.e., "manual dynamics") present new opportunities to study the nature of these links across development by providing a window into how perceptual,…

A crucial component of numerical understanding is one's ability to abstract numerical properties regardless of varying perceptual attributes. Evidence from numerical match-to-sample tasks suggests that children find it difficult to match sets based on number in the face of varying perceptual attributes, yet it is unclear whether these findings are…

Young children are able to categorize animals on the basis of unobservable features such as shared biological properties (e.g., bones). For the most part, children learn about these properties through explicit verbalizations from others. The present study examined how such input impacts children's learning about the properties of categories. In a…

Research to date has focused mostly on children's representation of their physical self as a prelude to the development of a theory of mind (ToM) and on their understanding of the self as distinct from others over time. Whether children approaching the well-known age of ToM mastery are also accurately appraising their own "body's"…

Word learning is a lifelong activity constrained by cognitive biases that people possess at particular points in development. Age of acquisition (AoA) is a psycholinguistic variable that may prove useful toward gauging the relative weighting of different phonological, semantic, and morphological factors at different phases of language acquisition…

This article introduces a promising new methodology called optical imaging. Optical imaging is used for measuring changes in cortical blood flow due to functional activation. The article outlines the pros and cons of using optical imaging for studying the brain correlates of perceptual, cognitive, and language development in infants and young…

A label can efficiently convey nonobvious information about category membership, but this information can sometimes conflict with one's own expectations. Two studies explored whether 24-month-olds (N = 56) would be willing to accept a category label indicating that an animal (Study 1) or artifact (Study 2) that looked like a member of one familiar…