We conducted three experiments to investigate how opportunities to view objects together in time influence memory for location. Children and adults learned the locations of 20 objects marked by dots on the floor of an open, square box. During learning, participants viewed the objects either simultaneously or in isolation. At test, participants…

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured…

Two experiments investigated how young children and adults understand whether objects are "by" a landmark and remember their locations. Three- and 4-year-old children and adults were asked to judge whether several blocks were "by" a landmark. The blocks were arranged so that their absolute and relative distances from the landmark varied. Later,…

In the present paper we investigated the development of the ability to reproduce extent in elementary school students. Children were shown a target line in a frame and were asked to reconstruct the line in a frame of a different size. One experimental condition involved reproducing "absolute extent," i.e., drawing a line that would be…

Under most circumstances, children (and adults) can safely assume that the testimony they hear is true. In two studies, we investigated whether 3-year-olds (N = 100) would continue to hold this assumption even if the person who provided the testimony behaved in an uncertain, ignorant, and/or distracted manner. In Study 1, children were less likely…

In the studies presented here, infants' understanding of others' attention was assessed when gaze direction cues were not diagnostic. Fourteen-, 18- and 24-month-olds witnessed an adult look to the side of an object and express excitement. In 1 experimental condition this object was new for the adult because she was not present while the child and…

Research using the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) showed that young children are usually able to sort accurately by an initial rule but are unable to switch to a new rule when the two rules conflict. In 2 experiments, the DCCS was modified to study the effects of feedback on 3- to 5-year-old children in a problem-solving task. In Experiment…

Seven-year-olds completed a Posner cued attention task, under both neutral and affectively charged conditions. Compared to the traditional (affect-neutral) Posner task, performance in the affective Posner task was marked by dramatic decreases in reaction times (RTs), an increase in errors, an increased validity effect (difference in RTs to the…

A modified elicited imitation task was used to examine the development of the ability to resist and overcome interference in the 2nd and 3rd years of life. In the modified task, distractor props were included in the test array, so that children could imitate the modeled sequence but could also produce actions with the additional props provided,…

Two-year-olds' appreciation of the shared nature of object labels versus object preferences was examined in 2 studies. A total of 128 24- to 27-month-olds played a finding game with an experimenter during which they were taught a piece of information about a target object in a nonostensive learning context. In Experiment 1, children were presented…

Phillips, Wellman, and Spelke (2002) provided experimental evidence indicating that by the age of 12 months infants use information about an adult's gaze-direction and emotional expression to predict action. We investigate the generality of this ability, using Phillips et al.'s paradigm across different referential gestures. If infants have a rich…

Several investigations have shown that young infants perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion but not when the object remains stationary. This study is an extension of earlier investigations on object unity in that it assesses amodal completion of stationary circles in which one half…