An implicit understanding of false belief indicated by anticipatory looking has been shown to be significantly correlated with performance on explicit false-belief tasks in 3- and 4-year-old children (Low, 2010). Recent evidence from infant research indicates, however, that implicit false-belief understanding guides infants' expectations about…

Prior research on implicit mind-reading skills has focussed on how infants anticipate other persons' actions. This study investigated whether 11- and 17-month-olds spontaneously attribute false beliefs (FB) even to a simple animated geometric shape. Infants were shown a triangle chasing a disk through a tunnel. Using an eye-tracker, we found that…

Research in non-human animal (hereafter, animal) cognition has found strong evidence that some animal species are capable of meta-cognitively monitoring their mental states. They know when they know and when they do not know. In contrast, animals have generally not shown robust theory of mind (ToM) capabilities. Comparative research uses methods…

The central question debated in current research on infant social cognition is "do infants have a theory of mind?" It is argued here that this question is understood and treated in radically different ways by different participants of the debate arguing either for (e.g., Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005) or against early competence in theory of mind…

The potential utility of a distinction between "automatic (or spontaneous) and implicit" versus "controlled and explicit" processes in theory of mind (ToM) is undercut by the fact that the terms can be employed to describe different but related distinctions within cognitive systems serving that function. These include distinctions in the…

Studies with infants show divergence between performance on theory of mind tasks depending on whether "direct" or "indirect" measures are used. It has been suggested that direct measures assess a flexible but cognitively demanding ability to reason about the minds of others, whereas indirect measures assess distinct processes which afford more…

Many authors have argued that infants understand goals, intentions, and beliefs. We posit that infants' success on such tasks might instead reveal an understanding of behaviour, that infants' proficient statistical learning abilities might enable such insights, and that maternal talk scaffolds children's learning about the social world as well. We…

The aim of this study was to determine whether or not pleasure, neutrality, and disgust expressed by eaters in photographs could affect the desire to eat food products to a greater extent in children than in adults. Children of 5 and 8 years of age, as well as adults, were presented with photographs of liked and disliked foods. These foods were…

This paper aims to provide developmental data on two connected naive inheritance concepts and to explore the coherence of children's naive biology knowledge. Two tasks examined children and adolescents' (4, 7, 10, and 14 years) conceptions of phenotypic resemblance across kin (in physical characteristics, disabilities, and personality traits). The…

This research examined whether peer relationships amongst ethnic minority status children reflect the social groups to which children belong and the degree to which they identify with these groups. A longitudinal study was conducted to investigate the influence of group identities (i.e., ethnic and national) on children's perceived peer acceptance…

From the moment infants are born, they seem to prefer orienting to social stimuli, over objects and non-social stimuli. This preference lasts throughout adulthood and is believed to play a crucial role in social-communicative development. By following up a group of infants at the age of 6, 8, and 12 months, this study explored the role of social…

Children's social interactions with their peers influence their psychosocial adjustment; consequently, the relationship between class-wide peer liking, same-gender peer liking, and school adjustment was explored in two age groups. Peer liking was analysed using the social relations model (SRM). In Study 1, 205 children (103 female and 102 male,…

Various measures have been used to investigate number processing in children, including a number comparison or a number line estimation task. The present study aimed to examine whether and to which extent these different measures of number representation are related to performance on a curriculum-based standardized mathematics achievement test in…

The present study explored gender differences in emerging language skills in 13,783 European children from 10 non-English language communities. It was based on a synthesis of published data assessed with adapted versions of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) from age 0.08 to 2.06. The results showed that girls are…

Moral conviction predicts interpersonal tolerance in adults, but its role in children and adolescents is not as well understood. This study measured moral conviction for a variety of issues along two separate dimensions--cognitive and affective--in children and adolescents (4th-12th grade). Results showed that, like adults, when children and…