Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5-7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about…

Interpreting iconic gestures can be challenging for children. Here, we explore the features and functions of iconic gestures that make them more challenging for young children to interpret than instrumental actions. In Study 1, we show that 2.5-year-olds are able to glean size information from handshape in a simple gesture, although their…

The amount of time adolescents spend communicating via digital technologies such as smartphones has led to concerns that computer-mediated communication (CMC) is displacing face-to-face (FtF) interactions and disrupting social development. Although many studies have examined CMC in adolescents' relationships with friends, few studies have examined…

In this study 9-month-old infants in rural and urban Gujarat, India were compared in how frequently and in which way they engage in triadic interactions. It was assumed that urban caregivers would engage in a child-centered interaction style, frequently creating triadic interactions and following infants' signals. It was also expected that they…

Infants' motor skill development triggers changes in parent-infant interactions, exploration, and play behaviors, particularly during periods of locomotor transitions. We investigated how these transitions reorganized infants' and mothers' explorations of spatial layouts. Thirteen infants and their mothers were followed biweekly from the age of 6…

The present research investigated the role of familiarity and proximity in infants' comprehension of displaced speech. When 13-and 16-month-old infants heard a researcher talk about a familiar person immediately after she left the room, they showed comprehension of the name by looking, pointing, or searching for the person in question. The…

We conducted 2 experiments to examine how mothers structure directions to young children for finding hidden objects and how young children use these directions to guide their searches. In Experiment 1, we examined the reference frames mothers use to communicate with their 2.5-, 3-, and 3.5-year-old children about location by asking mothers to…

Early social deprivation in highly social mammals interferes with their varying needs for security and stimulation. Toleration of social stimulation was studied in 18 adult ex-laboratory chimpanzees, who had been deprived for 16 to 27 years, during their 1st year after resocialization into 1 of 3 social groups. For this, a model of social…

The authors investigated how 3- and 4-year-old children and adults use relative distance to judge nearbyness. Participants judged whether several blocks were by a landmark. The absolute and relative distance of the blocks from the landmark varied. In Experiment 1, judgments of nearbyness decreased as the distance from the landmark increased, …

Six experiments examined young children's understanding that very recent past events determine the present. Found that 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, could locate a puppet they had observed being hidden either through a videotape or using a verbal analog of the task. When children observed 2 events in which they participated, only 5-year-olds…

Two studies examined 9- to 15-month-olds' ability to deduce an abstract nonmatching rule from reward feedback. Results showed that physical connectedness between stimuli and reward was key to performance. In the absence of the perception that stimulus and reward were components of a single thing, even close spatial and temporal proximity were…

Tested two models of the relationship between a hypothetical attachment mechanism and an incompatible motivation (a tendency to explore) by pitting two levels of attachment motivation against two levels of exploratory motivation among 15- to 18-month-old infants, alternating freely between play with novel toys at one end of the room and visits…