Geometry is one of the highest achievements of our species, but its foundations are obscure. Consistent with longstanding suggestions that geometrical knowledge is rooted in processes guiding navigation, the present study examines potential sources of geometrical knowledge in the navigation processes by which young children establish their sense…

Language has been linked to spatial representation and behavior in humans, but the nature of this effect is debated. Here, we test whether simple verbal expressions improve 4-year-old children's performance in a disoriented search task in a small rectangular room with a single red landmark wall. Disoriented children's landmark-guided search for a…

Do infants develop meaningful social preferences among novel individuals based on their social group membership? If so, do these social preferences depend on familiarity on any dimension, or on a more specific focus on particular kinds of categorical information? The present experiments use methods that have previously demonstrated infants' social…

Map reading is unique to humans but is present in people of diverse cultures, at ages as young as 4 years old. Here, we explore the nature and sources of this ability and ask both what geometric information young children use in maps and what nonsymbolic systems are associated with their map-reading performance. Four-year-old children were given…

Children take years to learn symbolic arithmetic. Nevertheless, non-human animals, human adults with no formal education, and human infants represent approximate number in arrays of objects and sequences of events, and they use these capacities to perform approximate addition and subtraction. Do children harness these abilities when they begin to…

A dedicated, non-symbolic, system yielding imprecise representations of large quantities (approximate number system, or ANS) has been shown to support arithmetic calculations of addition and subtraction. In the present study, 5-7-year-old children without formal schooling in multiplication and division were given a task requiring a scalar…

A series of studies investigated White U.S. 3- and 4-year-old children's use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others’ relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which…

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure,…

Mature representations of space and number are connected to one another in ways suggestive of a "mental number line", but this mapping could either be a cultural construction or a reflection of a more fundamental link between the domains of number and geometry. Using a manual bisection paradigm, we tested for number line representations in adults,…

Infants learn from adults readily and cooperate with them spontaneously, but how do they select culturally appropriate teachers and collaborators? Building on evidence that children demonstrate social preferences for speakers of their native language, Experiment 1 presented 10-month-old infants with videotaped events in which a native and a…

Two experiments investigated the influence of socially conveyed emotions and speech on infants' choices among food. After watching films in which two unfamiliar actresses each spoke while eating a different kind of food, 12-month-old infants were allowed to choose between the two foods. In Experiment 1, infants selected a food endorsed by a…