The present study suggests a method with which to assess the interrelations between different types of pretend play. In contrast to standard methods in this area, the various types of pretend play were measured within an interactive play scenario. The pretend play tasks were included in a semi-structured play sequence and presented to young…

Pre-term birth has a significant impact on infants' social and emotional competence, however, little is known about regulatory processes in pre-term mother-infant dyads during normal or stressful interactions. The primary goals of this study were to investigate the differences in infant and caregiver interactive behaviour and dyadic coordination…

Three experiments used dual-task suppression methodology to study the use of inner speech and visuospatial resources for mediating central executive performance by children with autism (CWA) and group-matched typically developing (TD) controls. Expt 1 revealed that CWA did not recruit inner speech to facilitate arithmetic task-switching…

A scale assessing generalized false self-perceptions (Perceptions of False Self, POFS) was developed and tested across three studies involving a total of 331 adolescents (11-16 years). In Study 1, interviews were conducted to develop items for the scale. In Study 2, psychometric techniques were used to derive a scale composed of 16 items. Study 2…

The current study investigated the effects of brief exposure to appearance-related media on young girls' body image. One hundred and twenty-one girls aged 3-6 years old participated. Results indicated that exposure did not affect body dissatisfaction or engagement in appearance-related play behaviours. This is the first empirical study to provide…

Children's reasoning was examined within two educational contexts (word reading and addition) so as to understand the factors that contribute to relational reasoning in the two domains. Sixty-seven 5- to 7-year-olds were given a series of related words to read or single-digit addition items to solve (interspersed with unrelated items). The…

In these studies, we examined how a default assumption about word meaning, the mutual exclusivity assumption and an intentional cue, gaze direction, interacted to guide 24-month-olds' object-word mappings. In Expt 1, when the experimenter's gaze was consistent with the mutual exclusivity assumption, novel word mappings were facilitated. When the…

Research shows that being a member of a group is sufficient to instigate more positive attitudes towards the in-group than an out-group in young children. The present study assessed whether children's intergroup attitudes during the middle childhood years are moderated by additional information about in-group and out-group members, as proposed by…

The sensitivity of male children (5-15 years) with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to the affective state of others was tested using an emotion recognition task. Only children without ASD could reliably differentiate between enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles. Results are considered in terms of the social impairments of children with…

Various lines of research have recently reported links between the ability to recall past and imagine future episodes. Here I report evidence that such links exist in development. Eighty-two children were asked to report what they did yesterday and what they are going to do tomorrow. Children who could answer one were also more likely to answer…

Associations between young children's attributions of emotion at different points in a story, and with regard to their own prediction about the story's outcome, were investigated using two hypothetical scenarios of social and emotional challenge (social entry and negative event). First grade children (N = 250) showed an understanding that emotions…

We investigated German and Nichols' finding that 3-year-olds could answer counterfactual conditional questions about short causal chains of events, but not long. In four experiments (N = 192), we compared 3- and 4-year-olds' performance on short and long causal chain questions, manipulating whether the child could draw on general knowledge to…

This paper examines the development and consistency of children's (4, 7, 10, and 14 years) naive concepts of inheritance using three tasks. A modified adoption task asked participants to distinguish between biological and social parentage in their predictions and explanations of the origins of different feature types (physical characteristics,…

Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy are common in our daily communication. This is one of the first studies to investigate metaphor and metonymy comprehension using a developmental approach. Forty-five typically developing individuals participated in a metaphor-metonymy verbal comprehension task incorporating 20 short…

Understanding and recognition of emotions relies on emotion concepts, which are narrative structures (scripts) specifying facial expressions, causes, consequences, label, etc. organized in a temporal and causal order. Scripts and their development are revealed by examining which components better tap which concepts at which ages. This study…