Prior work showed that infants look longer at impossible figures than possible ones, although it is unclear whether they or older children understand "impossibility." We employed a series of matching and sorting tasks with pictures and objects to evaluate children's knowledge of this dimension. In Experiment 1, nearly all children…

This study explored the development of theory of mind (ToM) in 80 Swedish-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds, a previously unstudied language and culture. The ToM scale was translated and tested in a Swedish context. The results show that the ToM abilities improve significantly with age. In addition, a gender difference was observed for the whole sample,…

Teaching styles were investigated in 28 middle-class sibling dyads (older sibling M age = 8.2 yrs; younger sibling M age = 5.11 yrs) using two sets of block design tasks (five easy; five hard). Older siblings employed a greater number of strategies (i.e. physical demonstrations, scaffolding, corrective feedback) in the hard than in the easy tasks,…