For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's…

Children's storybooks often contain fantasy elements, from dragons and wizards to anthropomorphic animals that wear clothes, talk, and behave like humans. These elements can impact children's learning from storybooks both positively and negatively, perhaps due in part to their ability to capture children's interest and attention. Prior research…

Adults use social-group membership to make inductive inferences about the properties of novel individuals, and this tendency is well established by the preschool years. Recent evidence suggests that infants attend to features associated with social groups and use social-group membership to interpret an agents' actions. The current study sought to…

Young children's racial stereotyping is poorly understood even though stereotyping can influence individuals' attitudes and behavior toward others. Here we present two preregistered studies (Total N = 257) examining White American children's (4-8 years) application of six stereotypes (about being American, smart, wealthy, sporty, honest, and nice)…

Understanding others' preference for a relational category of objects (e.g., prefer darker colored shirts) can be challenging for young children, as it involves comparison of choice options within and across exemplars. Adding to the challenge is occasional inconsistency in choices made by others. Here the authors examined whether 14-month-olds…

Beginning early in life, children are exposed to people who differ in social status. In five studies, we investigate whether 3- to 6-year-old children recognize different dimensions of status (i.e., wealth, physical dominance, decision-making power, and prestige) and use these dimensions to inform their social judgments (preferences and resource…

Our ability to shift from current to alternative (e.g., past and future) perspectives (i.e., "self-projection") plays a fundamental role in accurate decision-making. We investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' ability to shift perspective to reason about their future and past preferences. In Experiment 1 (N = 96), children were presented…

Engaging in prosocial behavior is costly. By selectively directing prosocial behavior toward individuals with a high probability of reciprocating, we are able to offset these potential costs and maintain a sustainable prosocial system. Often, we determine whether an individual will make a good prosocial partner through the observation of their…

Social categories are often defined by the boundaries that they form between individuals. However, many social structures describe "complementary" relationships between individuals, defining both the power that we hold over others and our obligations to them and vice versa. In two studies conducted in the U.S., we investigated a sample…

Children have repeatedly been shown to selectively prefer to learn from previously accurate informants rather than those who have been inaccurate in the past. However, the stability of individual differences in performance on such tasks has yet to be studied. We presented preschoolers with two identical selective learning tasks conducted one week…

The 4 experiments reported here used the preferential looking and habituation paradigms to examine whether 5-month-olds possess a perceptual template for snakes, sharks, and rodents. It was predicted that if infants possess such a template, then they would attend preferentially to schematic images of these nonhuman animal stimuli relative to…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

The early use of person perception terms was examined via an analysis of the spontaneous speech of four young children in conversation with their parents at home. All four children were producing such terms early in their third year. Like their parents, children used the terms in two distinguishable ways: to attribute a trait to a person or to…

Despite extant evidence of negative peer treatment of transgender adolescents and adults, little is known about how young children perceive transgender peers, particularly those who have socially transitioned or are living in line with their gender rather than sex at birth. Whereas children have been shown to be averse to gender nonconformity in…

Essentialism is the intuition that category membership relies on an invisible essence. Essentialist thinking about social categories is most evident in young children, while comparable methods do not reveal essentialist thinking about social groups in adult participants. However, previous work has found that essentialist thinking about gender was…