Rule selection versus rule execution in preschoolers: An error-detection approach.

In 2 experiments, an error-detection approach was used to determine whether 3-year-olds' perseverative errors on the postswitch phase of the Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS) are due to lack of response control or representational inflexibility. In Experiment 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds watched a puppet sort perseveratively on the postswitch phase and evaluated its responses. Most 4- and 5-year-olds detected the puppet's perseverative errors, whereas most 3-year-olds failed to do so despite detecting errors on a simpler card sort. Experiment 2 revealed that 3-year-olds who failed to correctly evaluate the puppet's behavior tended to fail their own DCCS. Results imply that perseveration on the DCCS cannot be attributed to difficulty inhibiting prepotent motor responses. Instead, changes in rule use between 3 and 5 years of age are interpreted in terms of the development of representational flexibility. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Understanding inference as a source of knowledge: Children's ability to evaluate the certainty of deduction, perception, and guessing.

Three experiments investigated children's understanding of inference as a source of knowledge. Children observed a puppet make a statement about the color of one of two hidden toys after the puppet (a) looked directly at the toy (looking), (b) looked at the other toy (inference), or (c) looked at neither toy (guessing). Most 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds did not rate the puppet as being more certain of the toy's color after the puppet looked directly at it or inferred its color than they did after the puppet guessed its color. Most 8- and 9-year-olds distinguished inference and looking from guessing. The tendency to explain the puppet's knowledge by referring to inference increased with age. Children who referred to inference in their explanations were more likely to judge deductive inference as more certain than guessing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The sources of normativity: Young children's awareness of the normative structure of games.

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children's awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in, and then performed an action that constituted a mistake in the game. In control conditions, the puppet performed the exact same action as in the experimental conditions, but the context was different such that this act did not constitute a mistake. Children's normative responses to the puppet's acts (e.g., protest, critique, or teaching) were scored. Both age groups performed more normative responses in the target than in the control conditions, but the 3-year-olds did so on a more explicit level. These studies demonstrate in a particularly strong way that even very young children have some grasp of the normative structure of conventional activities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Principles of Conventionality and Contrast in Word Learning: An Empirical Examination.

In Study 1, 4-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when exposed to a common or a proper noun in a puppet's presence or to a common noun in a puppet's absence, but not when exposed to a proper noun in a puppet's absence. In Study 2, 3-year-olds avoided 2 names for an object when the requester for the referent of a second label in a different language was bilingual and present during naming, but not when the speaker was bilingual but absent or monolingual. Study 3 followed up on the results of the first 2 studies. When children could assume that the puppet knew the name the experimenter used, they inferred that the puppet's use of a different name implied a different referential intent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of drawing on memory performance in young children.

In Experiment 1, 32 5- to 6-year-old boys and girls participated in a unique event and were interviewed about that event 1 day later. Half of the children were asked to draw what happened during the event and half were asked to tell what happened. In both conditions, only children's verbal behavior was scored. Children in the draw group were as accurate and reported more information than children in the tell group, especially in response to direct questions. In Experiment 2, 32 5- to 6-year-olds and 32 3- to 4-year-olds participated in the same event used in Experiment 1 and were interviewed 1 month later. The 5- to 6-year-olds in the draw group reported more information than the 5- to 6-year-olds in the tell group after the 1-month delay. Drawing did not, however, increase the amount of information reported by 3- to 4-year-olds. These findings have important theoretical implications for memory development and important practical implications for children's eyewitness testimony. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's use of triadic eye gaze information for "mind reading."

Five experiments examined children's use of eye gaze information for "mind-reading" purposes, specifically, for inferring another person's desire. When presented with static displays in the first 3 experiments, only by 4 years of age did children use another person's eye direction to infer desires, although younger children could identify the person's focus of attention. Further, 3-year-olds were capable of inferring desire from other nonverbal cues, such as pointing (Experiment 3). When eye gaze was presented dynamically with several other scaffolding cues (Experiment 4), 2- and 3-year-olds successfully used eye gaze for desire inference. Scaffolding cues were removed in Experiment 5, and 2- and 3-year-olds still performed above chance in using eye gaze. Results suggest that 2-year-olds are capable of using eye gaze alone to infer about another's desire. The authors propose that the acquisition of the ability to use attentional cues to infer another's mental state may involve both an association process and a differentiation process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers' understanding of others' desires: Fulfilling mine enhances my understanding of yours.

We developed a gift-giving task requiring children to identify their mother's desire, when her desire differed from theirs. We found a developmental change: 3- and 4-year-olds performed more poorly than 5-year-olds (Experiment 1). A modified version of this task (Experiment 2) revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds whose desires had been fulfilled chose an appropriate gift for their mothers significantly more often than children whose desires were unfulfilled. Children who merely anticipated desire fulfillment also outperformed children whose desires were unfulfilled. Analysis of children's verbal explanations provides converging evidence that desire fulfillment enhanced children's tendency to adopt the perspective of their mother and justify their choices by referencing her desires. Discussion focuses on why desire fulfillment enhances children's ability to consider the desires of others. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in children's use of external representations.

This study explored children's use of external representations. Experiment 1 focused on representations of self. Self-recognition was assessed by a mark test as a function of age (3 vs. 4 years), delay (5 s vs. 3 min), and media (photographs vs. drawings). Four-year-olds outperformed 3-year-olds; children performed better with photographs than drawings; and there was no effect of delay. In Experiment 2, 3- and 4-year-olds used a delayed video image to locate a sticker on themselves (self task) or a stuffed animal (other task). The 2 tasks were positively correlated with age and vocabulary partialed out. Experiment 3 used a search task to assess whether children have particular difficulty using external representations that conflict with their expectations: 3- and 4-year-olds were informed of an object's location verbally or through video; on half of the trials, this information conflicted with children's initial belief. Three-year-olds performed worse than 4-year-olds on conflict trials, indicating that assessments of self and other understanding may reflect children's ability to reason about conflicting external representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Antecedents and outcomes of coping behaviors among unemployed and reemployed individuals

Four experiments examined young children's understanding of the inverse relation between the number of parts into which a quantity is to be divided and the size of each part. In Experiment 1 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children tended to judge, incorrectly, that bigger shares would result from sharing with more, rather than fewer, recipients. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds correctly recognized the inverse effect of additional recipients when the sharing was based on subtraction rather than on equal partitioning. In Experiment 3, a modification of the equal-sharing task from Experiment 1 designed to reduce cognitive complexity successfully elicited correct performance from 7-year-olds but not from 5-year-olds. However, 5-year-olds markedly improved when they were given a chance to compare the outcomes of sharing with different numbers of recipients. Experiment 4 corroborated and extended this evidence of learning.     

When three is less than two: Early developments in children's understanding of fractional quantities.

Four experiments examined young children's understanding of the inverse relation between the number of parts into which a quantity is to be divided and the size of each part. In Experiment 1, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children tended to judge, incorrectly, that bigger shares would result from sharing with more, rather than fewer, recipients. In Experiment 2, 5-year-olds correctly recognized the inverse effect of additional recipients when the sharing was based on subtraction rather than on equal partitioning. In Experiment 3, a modification of the equal-sharing task from Experiment 1 designed to reduce cognitive complexity successfully elicited correct performance from 7-year-olds but not from 5-year-olds. However, 5-year-olds markedly improved when they were given a chance to compare the outcomes of sharing with different numbers of recipients. Experiment 4 corroborated and extended this evidence of learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are Eyes Windows to a Deceiver's Soul? Children's Use of Another's Eye Gaze Cues in a Deceptive Situation.

Three experiments examined 3- to 5-year-olds' use of eye gaze cues to infer truth in a deceptive situation. Children watched a video of an actor who hid a toy in 1 of 3 cups. In Experiments 1 and 2, the actor claimed ignorance about the toy's location but looked toward 1 of the cups, without (Experiment 1) and with (Experiment 2) head movement. In Experiment 3, the actor provided contradictory verbal and eye gaze clues about the location of the toy. Four- and 5-year-olds correctly used the actor's gaze cues to locate the toy, whereas 3-year-olds failed to do so. Results suggest that by 4 years of age, children begin to understand that eye gaze cues displayed by a deceiver can be informative about the true state of affairs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Limitations on preschool children's knowledge about counting: Using counting to compare two sets.

Possible limitations on preschool children's understanding of counting were examined by asking twenty 3-year-olds and twenty 4-year-olds to judge the appropriateness of counting carried out by a puppet. The puppet was asked to count either to find out how many objects were present altogether or to find out whether every object in one subset could have a corresponding object from the other subset. Within each counting task, half of the time the puppet counted all of the objects together and half of the time it counted the two subsets separately. Children at both ages showed some differentiation between the two counting tasks and performed at an above-chance level on the how-many task but not on the compare-sets task. The most common individual response pattern among the 3-year-olds was to judge both kinds of counts to be appropriate on both tasks, whereas the most common individual response pattern among the 4-year-olds was to judge counting of all the objects together to be appropriate and counting of the two subsets separately to be inappropriate on both tasks. The fact that children managed to differentiate appropriately between the two counting tasks despite using these basically undifferentiated strategies suggests that correct judgment processes coexisted with their predominant strategies and competed with them to determine performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's representation of spatial information acquired from maps.

The early development of the ability to acquire integrated knowledge of a space from a map was investigated in 130 children, 4 to 7 years of age. Experiment 1 demonstrated that all 6- and 7-year-olds and many 4- and 5-year-olds could learn the layout of a large playhouse composed of six adjoined rooms by memorizing a map. Children who learned the map before entering the playhouse more quickly learned a route through it than children who were not exposed to the map, and older children performed significantly better than younger children. In Experiment 2 preschoolers learned a map of a space that contained six spatially separated small rooms within one large room. Children could therefore view the entire configuration of smaller rooms as they traveled around the larger room. Preschoolers performed significantly better in Experiment 2 than in Experiment 1, and the majority of them performed perfectly or almost perfectly. Taken together, the findings help to clarify young children's map-reading abilities in several respects and suggest that preschoolers' abilities are more substantial than has been assumed or demonstrated previously. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of young children's understanding that the recent past is causally bound to the present.

The results of 6 studies (involving 304 children) suggested that 4- and 5-year olds, but not 3-year olds, understand that very recent past events determine the present. In Studies 1–3, 3- and 4-year old children were introduced to 2 empty hiding locations. With children's backs to these locations, a camera recorded an experimenter secretly hiding a puppet in one of them. Children viewed the videotape of what had just happened, along with another tape that depicted identical events with a different child and with the puppet hidden in the other location. Only 4-year olds were subsequently able to locate the puppet, even though 3-year olds remembered the contents of the tapes and understood the equivalence between the video events and the real world. In Study 4, similar effects were obtained when a verbal analog of the test was presented to 3–5 year olds. Studies 5 and 6 showed that when children observed 2 events in which they had just participated, only 5-year olds understood that the most recent events were relevant. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When all signs point to you: Lies told in the face of evidence.

Young children's ability to tell a strategic lie by making it consistent with the physical evidence of their transgression was investigated along with the sociocognitive correlates of such lie-telling behaviors. In Experiment 1, 247 Chinese children between 3 and 5 years of age (126 boys) were left alone in a room and asked not to lift a cup to see the contents. If children lifted up the cup, the contents would be spilled and evidence of their transgression would be left behind. Upon returning to the room, the experimenter asked children whether they peeked and how the contents of the cup ended up on the table. Experiment 1 revealed that young children are able to tell strategic lies to be consistent with the physical evidence by about 4 or 5 years of age, and this ability increases in sophistication with age. Experiment 2, which included 252 Chinese 4-year-olds (127 boys), identified 2 sociocognitive factors related to children's ability to tell strategic lies. Specifically, both children's theory-of-mind understanding and inhibitory control skills were significantly related to their ability to tell strategic lies in the face of physical evidence. The present investigation reveals that contrary to the prevailing views, even young children are able to tell strategic lies in some contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parental scaffolding of young children's spatial communication.

Two studies documented and evaluated parental scaffolding of 3- and 4-year-olds' spatial communication. In Study 1, children gave directions to parents about locations of objects. Three-year-olds gave ambiguous directions more often than 4-year-olds, and parents used directive prompts more often with 3-year-olds than 4-year-olds. Study 2 compared the effectiveness of parental prompts in a controlled experiment. Each time children gave ambiguous directions, they were given either a directive prompt, nondirective prompt, or no prompt. Both age groups benefitted from directive prompts, but 3-year-olds benefitted less than 4-year-olds from nondirective prompts. Discussion focuses on parents' sensitivity to children's scaffolding needs and on developmental differences in children's responses to scaffolding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical ambiguity resolution in good and poor comprehenders: An eye fixation and self-paced reading study in primary school children.

To investigate the use of context and monitoring of comprehension in lexical ambiguity resolution in children, the authors asked 10- to 12-year-old good and poor comprehenders to read sentences consisting of 2 clauses, 1 containing the ambiguous word and the other the disambiguating information. The order of the clauses was reversed so that disambiguating information either preceded or followed the ambiguous word. Context use and comprehension monitoring were examined by measuring eye fixations (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading times (Experiment 2) on the ambiguous word and disambiguating region. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 showed that poor comprehenders made use of prior context to facilitate lexical ambiguity resolution as effectively as good comprehenders but that they monitored their comprehension less effectively than good comprehenders. Good comprehenders corrected an initial interpretation error on an ambiguous word and restored comprehension once they encountered the disambiguating region. Poor comprehenders failed to deal with this type of comprehension failure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers infer ownership from “control of permission”.

Owners control permission—they forbid and permit others to use their property. So it is reasonable to assume that someone controlling permission over an object is its owner. The authors tested whether preschoolers infer ownership in this way. In the first experiment, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, chose as owner of an object a character who granted or denied another character permission to use it. In Experiment 2, older 3-year-olds chose as owner of an object a character who prevented another character from using it when prevention was accomplished by controlling permission but not otherwise. Younger 3-year-olds chose between the characters at chance. These findings indicate that preschoolers infer ownership from control of permission. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's use of the common ground in interpreting ambiguous referential utterances.

Common ground is contextual information shared by a listener and speaker that enables the listener to convert an ambiguous utterance to an informative communication. Four experiments examined young children's understanding of the common ground in interpreting ambiguous referential utterances. Kindergarten and 2nd-grade children and college students were read short vignettes containing statement, joint activity, status common ground, and an ambiguous or informative utterance about a display of 4–6 object drawings. The subjects were asked (a) whether the listener knew which object to pick (Experiment 1), (b) to pick an object themselves or choose "none" (Experiment 2), (c) the source of the listener's knowledge in the context or utterance (Experiment 3), and (d) whether a designated object was the "right one," the one the speaker "meant," or the one the speaker "could have meant" (Experiment 4). Even the kindergarten children used statement information effectively in interpreting ambiguous utterances, and all groups had difficulty using status information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity.

Participants were interviewed about the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent. In Experiment 1, even 4- to 6-year-olds stated that biological processes ceased at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds. In Experiment 2, 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about psychological functioning. The youngest children were equally likely to state that both cognitive and psychobiological states continued at death, whereas the oldest children were more likely to state that cognitive states continued. In Experiment 3, children and adults were asked about an array of psychological states. With the exception of preschoolers, who did not differentiate most of the psychological states, older children and adults were likely to attribute epistemic, emotional, and desire states to dead agents. These findings suggest that developmental mechanisms underlie intuitive accounts of dead agents' minds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)