Infants who receive better counting input at home tend to become toddlers with better number knowledge in preschool. However, for many children, in-person counting experience is not always available, despite educational media becoming increasingly prevalent. Might virtual counting experience benefit the young mind? Using a novel online looking…

Two experiments investigated perceived and physiological changes in anxiety in children (7-11 years; N = 222; 98 female) in a performance situation after they observed another child in a similar situation with a negative or neutral outcome. The sample's London, United Kingdom, school catchment areas ranged from low to high socioeconomic statuses…

Adults often act considerately toward others, for example, by leaving the last cookie on a plate or stepping aside on a busy sidewalk. What do young children infer from observing considerate behavior? In three preregistered studies, we assess how young children evaluate considerate and inconsiderate behavior by showing them animated videos in…

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as "uh-oh," "hi," "more," "up," and "all-gone," are typically among the first to…

Rehearsal is a form of self-talk used to support short-term memory. Historically, the study of rehearsal development has diverged from the study of self-talk more generally. The current experiment examines whether two characteristics of self-talk (impact of task difficulty and self-talk's narrative vs. planning purpose) are also observed in…

Children learn what words mean from hearing words used across a variety of contexts. Understanding how different contextual distributions relate to the words young children say is critical because context robustly affects basic learning and memory processes. This study examined children's everyday experiences using naturalistic video recordings to…

Children often encounter events that bear on their moral and other evaluations, such as physical aggression and material disorder. Children's perceptions and evaluations are decisive for how they respond to and learn from these everyday events. Using a new method for investigating the development of social perceptions and evaluations, researchers…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

Infants learn nouns during object-naming events--moments when caregivers name the object of infants' play (e.g., ball as infant holds a ball). Do caregivers also label the actions of infants' play (e.g., roll as infant rolls a ball)? We investigated connections between mothers' verb inputs and infants' actions. We video-recorded 32 infant-mother…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over time and individual differences among mothers…

Prior studies have demonstrated that social norms or cues of others' eating behaviors serve as powerful guides for one's own eating behaviors. Yet it remains underexplored whether young children are susceptible to social pressure by remote peers when faced with a conflict between what they prefer and the healthy choices of a group majority. Here…

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a…

Over the last 2 centuries there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of children who grow up in cities. However, relatively little work has explored in detail the physiological and cognitive pathways through which city life may affect early development. To assess this, we observed a cohort of infants growing up in diverse settings across…

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experience about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--that is, to engage in higher-order…

Recent evidence from studies using head cameras suggests that the frequency of faces directly in front of infants "declines" over the first year and a half of life, a result that has implications for the development of and evolutionary constraints on face processing. Two experiments tested 2 opposing hypotheses about this observed…