There is inconsistent evidence that human bodies are processed through holistic processing as it has been widely reported for faces. To assess how configural and holistic processes may develop with age, we administered a visual body recognition task assessing the presence of body inversion and composite illusion effects to white adults (114…

Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes termed bias to trust in testimony, has primarily been studied in children preschool-age and younger, presumably…

This study examined the stability of three patterns of infant regulatory behavior identified in the face-to-face still-face (FFSF) paradigm at 3 and 9 months--social-positive oriented, distressed-inconsolable, and self-comfort oriented--and whether variations in infants' heart-rate were correlated with them. Although some studies have examined the…

Preschoolers use both direct observation of statistical data and informant testimony to learn causal relationships. Can children integrate information from these sources, especially when source reliability is uncertain? We investigate how children handle a conflict between what they hear and what they see. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds were…

The goal of the current study was to statistically evaluate the reliable scalability of a set of tasks designed to assess Theory of Mind (ToM) without language as a confounding variable. This tool might be useful to study ToM in populations where language is impaired or to study links between language and ToM. Low verbal versions of the ToM tasks…

This research investigates whether and how two fundamental environmental factors--harshness and unpredictability--interact in regulating child and adolescent development, informed by life-history theory and drawing on data from the National Institute of Child Health & Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N =…

Studies show that children trust previously reliable sources over previously unreliable ones (e.g., Koenig, Clement, & Harris, 2004). However, it is unclear from these studies whether children rely on accuracy or conventionality to determine the reliability and, ultimately, the trustworthiness of a particular source. In the current study, 3- and…

We examined whether similarity, familiarity, and reliability cues guide children's learning and whether these cues are weighed differently with age. Three- to 5-year-olds (n = 184) met 2 informant puppets, 1 of which was similar (Experiment 1) or familiar (Experiment 2) to the participants. Initially, children's preference for either informant was…

Preschoolers, as a group, are highly attuned to causality, and this attunement is known to facilitate memory, learning, and problem solving. However, recent work reveals substantial individual variability in the strength of children's "causal stance," as demonstrated by their curiosity about and preference for new causal information. In…

Age at menarche is critical in research and clinical settings, yet there is a dearth of studies examining its reliability in adolescents. We examined age at menarche during adolescence, specifically, (a) average method reliability across 3 years, (b) test-retest reliability between time points and methods, (c) intraindividual variability of…

Knowledge transfer is most effective when speakers provide good quality (in addition to accurate) information. Two studies investigated whether preschool- (4-5 years old) and school-age (6-7 years old) children prefer speakers who provide sufficient information over those who provide insufficient (yet accurate) information. Children were provided…

How individuals construct narratives involving attachment figures (e.g., parents) should reflect their representation of those individuals as either comforting or unsupportive (Bowlby, 1969). Similarly, how individuals talk about parents' childhood experiences may also reflect their attachment representation. Sixty-five 13- to 16-year-old…

Three studies examined 24-month-olds' sensitivity to the prior accuracy of the source of information and the way in which young children modify their word learning from inaccurate sources. In Experiments 1A, 2, and 3, toddlers interacted with an accurate or inaccurate speaker who trained and tested children's comprehension of a new word-object…

The purposes of this study were to conceptualize moral identity as moral ideal self, to develop a measure of this construct, to test for age and gender differences, to examine links between moral ideal self and adolescent outcomes, and to assess purpose and social responsibility as mediators of the relations between moral ideal self and outcomes.…

Psychologists have long debated the role of early experience in social and cognitive development. However, traditional approaches to studying this issue are not well positioned to address this debate. The authors present simulations that indicate that the associations between early experiences and later outcomes should approach different…