Children often talk themselves through their activities. They produce private speech (PS), which is internalized to form inner speech (silent verbal thought). Twenty-five 8-10-year-olds completed four tasks in a laboratory context (Tower of London, digit span, and two measures of spatial IQ). PS production was recorded. Eleven months later, the…

Three experiments examined 3- and 5-year-olds' recognition of faces in constant and varied emotional expressions. Children were asked to identify repeatedly presented target faces, distinguishing them from distractor faces, during an immediate recognition test and during delayed assessments after 10 min and one week. Emotional facial expression…

In prior research, preschoolers were surprisingly poor at naming the emotion purportedly signaled by prototypical facial expressions--when shown as static images. To determine whether this poor performance is due to the use of static stimuli, rather than dynamic, we presented preschoolers (3-5 years) with facial expressions as either static images…

The current study examined the role of executive functioning (EF) in children's prospective memory (PM) by assessing the effect of delay and number of intentions to-be-remembered on PM, as well as relations between PM and EF. Ninety-six 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds completed a PM task and two executive function tasks. The PM task required children to…

Young children learn from others' examples, and they do so selectively. We examine whether the efficacy of prior experiences influences children's imitation. Thirty-six-month-olds had initial experience on a causal learning task either by performing the task themselves or by watching an adult perform it. The nature of the experience was…

Third, fifth, and seventh graders selected the best strategy (rounding up or rounding down) for estimating answers to two-digit addition problems. Executive function measures were collected for each individual. Data showed that (a) children's skill at both strategy selection and execution improved with age and (b) increased efficiency in executive…

We investigated how 3-7-year-olds weigh and coordinate information about specific mental states with social norms in the domain of contextually conventional rules. With increasing age, participants increasingly took into account an actor's mental state to predict that actor's behavior. In a criticism judgment task, 7-year-olds could assign…

Considerable evidence indicates that shape similarity plays a major role in object recognition, identification and categorization. However, little is known about shape processing and its development. Across four experiments, we addressed two related questions. First, what makes objects similar in shape? Second, how does the processing of shape…

Little is known about the origins of the pointing gesture. We sought to gain insight into its emergence by investigating individual differences in the pointing of 12-month-old infants in two ways. First, we looked at differences in the communicative and interactional uses of pointing and asked how different hand shapes relate to point frequency,…

Two experiments investigate whether 7-month-olds reason about the origin of motion events by considering two sources of causally relevant information: spatiotemporal cues and dispositional status information derived from the identification of an object as either animate (with the enduring causal property of self-initiated motion) or inanimate…

The current study replicates and extends the finding (Hamlin, Wynn & Bloom, 2007) that infants prefer individuals who act prosocially toward unrelated third parties over those who act antisocially. Using different stimuli from those used by Hamlin et al. (2007), somewhat younger subjects, and 2 additional social scenarios, we replicated the…

Recent studies suggest that 5-year-olds can add and compare large numerical quantities through approximate representations of number. However, the nature of this understanding and its susceptibility to environmental influences remain unclear. We examined whether children's early competence depends on the canonical problem format (i.e., arithmetic…

We consider young children's construals of biological phenomena and the forces that shape them, using Carey's (1985) category-based induction task that demonstrated anthropocentric reasoning in young urban children. Follow-up studies (including our own) have questioned the generality of her results, but they have employed quite different…

Adults can be adapted to a particular facial distortion in which both eyes are shifted symmetrically (Robbins, R., McKone, E., & Edwards, M. (2007). "Aftereffects for face attributes with different natural variability: Adapter position effects and neural models." "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33," 570-592),…

Three experiments examined children's (N = 80; 40; 48) sensitivity to error magnitude as a measure of informants' past accuracy, and indication of future reliability. Experiments 1 and 2 assessed whether, in a forced-choice task, children would evaluate as better and show greater trust in an informant whose previous errors were consistently within…