Mediated learning experience (MLE) stresses that the quality of interaction between the child and the environment via a human mediator plays a pivotal role in the cognitive development of the individual. Feuerstein's theory of structural cognitive modifiability posited that humans have the propensity to change the structure of their cognitive…

This article elucidates the unfolding of 3 phases of cognitive development through which typical children move during the first 2 years of life to illuminate the interrelationships among early cognition, communicative intention, and word-learning strategies. The resulting theoretical framework makes clear the developmental prerequisites for social…

The ability of 3- and 4-year-old children to disregard advice from an overtly misleading informant was investigated across five studies (total "n" =212). Previous studies have documented limitations in young children's ability to reject misleading advice. This study was designed to test the hypothesis that these limitations are primarily…

Two experiments were conducted to explore the extent to which individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as well as young typically developing (TD) children, are explicitly aware of their own and others' intentions. In Experiment 1, participants with ASD were significantly less likely than age- and ability-matched comparison participants to…

Using an elicited imitation paradigm, we investigated whether young children imitate the communicative intentions behind speech. Previous research using elicited imitation has shown that children tend to correct ungrammatical sentences. This finding is usually interpreted as evidence that children, like adults, remember and reproduce the gist of…

Two tasks were administered to 40 children aged from 16 to 20 months (mean age = 18;1), to evaluate children's understanding of declarative and informative intention [Behne, T., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2005). One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions behind gestures in a hiding game. "Developmental Science", 8, 492-499;…

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a…

We present three studies exploring 2- to 4-year-olds' imitation on witnessing a model whose questionable tool use choices suggested her untrustworthiness. In Study 1, children observed the model accidentally select a physically optimal tool for a task and then intentionally reject it for one that was functionally nonaffordant. When asked to…

The present study investigated event-based prospective memory in five age groups of preschoolers (i.e., 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds). Applying a laboratory-controlled prospective memory procedure, the data showed that event-based prospective memory performance improves across the preschool years, at least between 3 and 6 years of age. However,…

The ideas of Vygotsky [Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). "Thinking and speech." In "The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky," (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum. (Original work published 1934.)] have been increasingly influential in accounting for social-environmental influences on the development of social understanding (SU). In the first part of this article, I…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…

This paper discusses factors that relate to the development of children's theory of mind. Cognitive and biosocial views of the development of theory of mind are distinquished. The paper maintains that all cultures recognize the intentional personhood of children in the first two years, though they vary in their methods of dealing with this…

Examined how 3- and 5-year-olds and adults extend names for human-made artifacts. Found that even 3-year-olds were more likely to provide artifact names (e.g., "knife") when they believed objects were intentionally created and to provide material-based descriptions (e.g., "plastic") when they believed objects were accidentally…

This experiment tested whether children's insight into a difficult symbolic relation could be increased by explicitly emphasizing the intentionality surrounding the artifact's creation and use. Specifically, I explicitly emphasized (a) the adult's intent to communicate information via the artifact and (b) the artifact's intentional origins and…

Four studies examined 3- and 4-year-olds' ability to judge accurately whether they acted intentionally. Children self-initiated action to attain an outcome, or their arm was moved by the experimenter to create an outcome. In Experiment 3, children in both age groups accurately claimed they were agents of self-guided action but not of passive…