Playing board games and other math activities can provide young children with opportunities to develop their math skills. However, it is critical to understand for whom these activities may be most beneficial. In two studies, we examine the extent to which foundational cognitive skills moderate the effects of playing math games on math skills. In…

As adults, we might understand that beliefs often spread because people are strongly influenced by their friends, family, and other social connections. However, do we think those influences are strong enough to overrule direct evidence of a friend's unreliability? And do preschoolers expect people to show such biases toward friends and to…

Learning requires effort, but children cannot try hard at everything. Here, we evaluated whether children use their improvement over time to decide whether to stick with a challenge. To eliminate the effect of individual differences in ability or prior knowledge, we created a novel paradigm that allowed us to surreptitiously control children's…

When deciding whether to trust someone's claims, how do children combine - over multiple interactions - information about that person's general behavioral tendencies (traits) with that person's ongoing (and changing) rate of providing accurate claims? Children aged 4-8 played 11 rounds of a find-the-sticker game. For each round, an informant…

Natural languages distinguish between telic predicates that denote events leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g., "draw a balloon") and atelic predicates that denote events with no inherent endpoint (e.g., "draw balloons"). Telicity distinctions in many languages are already partly available to 4-5-year-olds. Here, using…

This randomized controlled trial explored the effects of parental reminiscing training on preschoolers' memory and metacognition among French-speaking White parents and their typically developing children (24 females, 20 males; M[subscript months] = 49.64) in Belgium. Participants were assigned, with age stratification, to the immediate…

This study examines the moment-to-moment within-person associations between maternal and child behaviors during a challenging puzzle task and compares these associations between mother--child dyads from the United States (n = 99, 52 boys, M[subscript child age] = 56.05 months, SD = 6.44) and China (n = 101, 46 boys, M[subscript child age] = 57.41…

While negative associations between behavioral inhibition/shyness and social competence are well established for children from Western cultures, the directions of these associations have been inconsistent for Chinese children, partly due to the ongoing social-cultural changes in China. Drawing from three samples of young Chinese children (born…

Finger gnosia and fine motor skills (FMS) are assumed to play a key role in the development of arithmetic abilities, but their contribution to early numerical skills (i.e., enumeration skills and cardinality) has received little attention so far. The purpose of this study was to investigate the predictive value of finger gnosia and FMS to…

Guided by emotional security theory, this study examined the family-level antecedents of children's reaction patterns to interparental conflict in a sample of 243 preschool children (M age = 4.60 years; 48% Black; 16% Latinx; 56% girls) and their parents in the Northeastern United States. Behavioral observations of children's responses to…

Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use…

In certain domains, people represent some of an individual's properties (e.g., a tiger's ferocity), but not others (e.g., a tiger's being in the zoo), as stemming from the assumed "essence" of the individual's category. How do children identify which properties of an individual are essentialized and which are not? Here, we examine…

We examine the long-standing claim that understanding relational correspondence is a general component of representational understanding. Two experiments with 175 preschool children located in Norwich, United Kingdom, examined the use of a scale model comparing performances on a "copy" task, measuring abstract spatial arrangement…

The normative, developmental changes in affect-biased attention during the preschool years are largely unknown. To investigate the attention bias for emotional versus neutral faces, an eye-tracking measurement and free viewing of paired pictures of facial expressions (i.e., happy, fearful, sad, or angry faces) and nonface pictures with neutral…

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…