Presents new measure of children's use of an editing operation that suppresses false memories by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Application of the methodology showed that false-memory editing increased dramatically between early and middle childhood. Measure reacted appropriately to experimental manipulations. Developmental reductions…

Children learn many new categories and make inferences about these categories. Much work has examined how children make inferences on the basis of category knowledge. However, inferences may also affect what is learned about a category. Four experiments examine whether category-based inferences during category learning influence category knowledge…

Previous research on typically developing children has shown that their memory for events depends on how they are encoded. As children grow older, they start to mention causal and temporal relationships between events, including psychological causes. Children with specific language impairment (SLI) were studied to disentangle the effects of…

Investigation of children's knowledge of the Earth can reveal much about the origins, content and structure of scientific knowledge, and the processes of conceptual change and development. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992, claim that children construct coherent mental models of a flat, flattened, or hollow Earth based on a framework theory and intuitive…

Because moral transgressions are considered more serious than non-moral (i.e. conventional or personal) transgressions, it is less threatening to self-esteem to interpret one's own delinquent act as a non-moral transgression rather than a moral transgression. This 'domain shift' could be a way of reducing cognitive dissonance. It was expected that…

This article presents three studies conducted in Canada and Australia that relate theory of mind (ToM) development to mental state discourse. In Study 1, mental state discourse was examined while parents and their 5-7-year-old children jointly read a storybook which had a surprise ending about the identity of the main character. Comments specific…

Aim: This study aimed to explore the role of peer influences in the development of body dissatisfaction and dieting awareness in young girls. Method: A sample of 81 girls (aged 5-8 years) were recruited from the first 3 years of formal schooling. Girls were individually interviewed. Body dissatisfaction was assessed by means of figure rating…

Forty-four children (mean 3.8 years) were given three false belief, a working memory, and four language tasks (each designed to tap a different aspect of syntax or semantics), and were tested again 6 months later. Once the range of scores in the language and false belief tasks were equated, there was a bidirectional relation between language and…

Researchers in early social-cognition have found that the ability to reverse an ambiguous figure is correlated with success on theory of mind tasks (e.g. Gopnik & Rosati, 2001). The present experiment examined children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) without mental delay to see whether a similar relationship existed. Ropar, Mitchell, and…

We examined 3- to 6-year-old children's attributions of pretence when their own or another's behaviours were characterized as similar (usually unintentionally) to that of a real or nonexistent animal. In some pretence tasks, we asked children if they were trying to look like or looked like the animal they were characterized as looking like; in…

We examined 3- to 6-year-old children's understanding of their own and another's false beliefs in two experiments using diverse deceptive box and unexpected transfer tasks. Tasks in the first experiment required the child to think about an absent person's responses to questions, whereas those in the second experiment used a confederate present…

Intergroup attitudes were assessed in European-American first grade (M=6.8 years) and fourth grade (M=9.9 years) boys and girls (N=94) to test hypotheses about implicit racial biases, perceptions of similarity between peer dyads, and judgments about cross-race friendships. Two assessments, an ambiguous situations task and a perceptions of…

Intergroup attitudes were assessed in African-American (N=70) and non-African-American minority (N=80) children, evenly divided by gender, in first (M=6.5 years old) and fourth (M=9.6 years old) grades attending mixed-ethnicity public schools in a suburban area of a large mid-Atlantic city in the USA. Children were interviewed to test hypotheses…

A scale was constructed to assess children's generalized trust beliefs (CGTB) in four target groups (mother, father, teacher and peer) with respect to three bases of trust: reliability, emotionality, and honesty. The CGTB Scale was administered to 145 Year 5 and 156 Year 6 children (mean age = 10 years, 1 month) residing in the English Midlands,…

Previous research by Lidster and Bremner (1999) on young children's ability to coordinate two dimensions has shown that performance on construction tasks (in which children have to give the correct coordinates for a point in space that is already known) is superior to performance on interpretation tasks (in which children are given a pair of…