Seventy-nine 3- and 4-year-old children were tested on gaze-reporting ability and Wellman and Liu's (2004) continuous measure of theory of mind (ToM). Children were better able to report where someone was looking when eye and head direction were provided as a cue compared with when only eye direction cues were provided. With the exception of…

In this article the author describes challenges associated with integrating physiological measures of stress into developmental research, especially in the domains of memory and cognition. An initial critical challenge concerns how to define stress, which can refer to one or a series of events, a response, the consequence of that response, an…

Fifteen-month-old infants detected a violation when an actor performed an action that did not match her preceding vocal cue: The infants looked reliably longer when the actor expressed a humorous vocal cue followed by a sweet action or expressed a sweet vocal cue followed by a humorous action, than when the vocal cue was followed by a matching…

When learning object function, infants must detect relations among features--for example, that squeezing is associated with squeaking or that objects with wheels roll. Previously, Perone and Oakes (2006) found 10-month-old infants were sensitive to relations between object appearances and actions, but not to relations between appearances and…

The relationship between emergent spatial understanding in different cognitive domains, including navigation and language, has rarely been studied using methods that allow for the examination of individual differences. In this study the authors explored emergent place learning and its relationship to early spatial language, namely prepositions, in…

The current study investigated how young learners' experiences with arithmetic equations can lead to learning of an arithmetic principle. The focus was elementary school children's acquisition of the Relation to Operands principle for subtraction (i.e., for natural numbers, the difference must be less than the minuend). In Experiment 1, children…

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge…

Object use is a ubiquitous characteristic of the human species, and learning how objects function is a fundamental part of development. In this article the authors examine the role that intentionality plays in children's understanding of causal relationships during observational learning of object use. Children observed demonstrations in which…

The authors investigated whether manipulating parents' goals regarding their discussion of an upcoming staged event with their 6-year-old children differentially influenced the children's recall. Parents (n = 62) were asked to prepare their child for a staged novel event--"visiting the pretend zoo"--to take place 1 day later. One group ("inform")…

Eye tracking offers a powerful research tool for developmental scientists. In this brief article, the author introduces the methodology and issues associated with its applications in developmental research, beginning with an overview of eye movements and eye-tracking technologies, followed by examples of how it is used to study the developing mind…

In a training study, the authors addressed whether or not preschoolers' difficulty with false belief is due to a domain-specific problem with mental states. Following Slaughter's (1998) design, 57 children who failed a false-belief (FB) pretest received two sessions of training on either an FB, false sign (FS), or control task. All children were…

Representing the spatial appearance of objects and scenes in drawings is a difficult task for young children in particular. In the present study, the relationship between spatial drawing and cognitive flexibility was investigated. Seven- to 11-year-olds (N = 60) were asked to copy a three-dimensional model in a drawing. The use of depth cues as an…

Cognitive psychologists have begun to address how motivational factors influence adults' performance on cognitive tasks. However, little research has examined how different motivational factors interact with one another to affect behavior across the life span. In the current study, the authors examined how children perform on a classification task…

Children growing up in a dual-language environment have to constantly monitor the dynamic communicative context to determine what the speaker is trying to say and how to respond appropriately. Such self-generated efforts to monitor speakers' communicative needs may heighten children's sensitivity to, and allow them to make better use of,…

Personal narratives are integral to autobiographical memory and to identity, with coherent personal narratives being linked to positive developmental outcomes across the lifespan. In this article, we review the theoretical and empirical literature that sets the stage for a new lifespan model of personal narrative coherence. This new model…