Young children's understanding of desire formation.

Two studies examined preschoolers' appreciation of how mental states arise. In Study 1, children aged 3 to 5 (24 at each age) better understood perception-generated beliefs (e.g., that looking in a certain location generates a belief about the location's content) and attitude-generated desires (e.g., that positive experiences with an activity generate a desire to partake of the activity again) than physiology-generated desires (e.g., that not eating for a long time generates a desire for food). In Study 2, 4- and 5-year-olds (48 at each age) better understood the effects of quantity of experience (e.g.. eating a lot vs. a little) than of time of experience (eating just now vs. a long time ago) on physiological states and desires. The findings suggest that whether children reason in more advanced fashion about desires or beliefs depends on which aspects of these mental states are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's incidental and intentional retention of televised events.

Determined whether young children show a visual-superiority effect (i.e., higher retention of visual than auditory information) only when they view cartoons for entertainment. 24 preschoolers' short-term recognition of audio and video information was assessed under conditions of intentional and incidental learning. Off-task glancing was also measured while Ss were actually viewing the show. Contrary to expectations, forewarning Ss that they would be tested on the show's content increased the magnitude of the visual-superiority effect, even though more frequent off-task glancing occurred in conjunction with intentional than with incidental instructions. Findings are discussed in terms of S. Ward and D. B. Wackman's (1973) stage model for processing televised information. (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's understanding of different mental states.

There is considerable evidence in the recent literature on children's understanding of the mind that young children have difficulty understanding false beliefs. Even when presented very strong evidence that a person's belief conflicts with the reality to which it refers, they tend to assume that it coincides with reality. Two studies tested the extent to which 3-yr-olds make this same mistake with other mental states. Results show that children of this age understand that desires can differ from reality before they understand that beliefs can, even when the exact same tasks are used to assess each understanding. Findings also indicate that young children understand pretense in this regard somewhat later than desire but earlier than belief and dream, particularly when the pretense is supported by actions. Three explanations for the results are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's emerging ability to make false statements.

This study examined the origins of children's ability to make consciously false statements, a necessary component of lying. Children 2 to 5 years of age were rewarded for claiming that they saw a picture of a bird when viewing pictures of fish. They were asked outcome questions (“Do you win/lose?”), recognition questions (“Do you have a bird/fish?”), and recall questions (“What do you have?”), which were hypothesized to vary in difficulty depending on the need for consciousness of falsity (less for outcome questions) and self-generation of an appropriate response (more for recall questions). The youngest children (2? to 3? years old) were above chance on outcome questions, but it was not until age 3? that children performed above chance on recognition questions or were capable of maintaining false claims across question types. Findings have implications for understanding the emergence of deception in young children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's understanding of conflicting mental representation predicts suggestibility.

This study examined the relation between developmental suggestibility effects and preschoolers' emerging ability to reason about conflicting mental representations (CMRs). Three- to 5-yr-olds listened to a story accompanied by pictures. Following a 4-min delay, children answered straightforward and misleading questions about the story. One wk later, their memory for the story was assessed. Children also completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about CMRs. Stepwise regression analyses revealed that suggestibility was negatively related to performance on CMR tasks. This finding remained significant after controlling for age, children's level of initial encoding of the event, and their ability to retrieve event details when not misled. An integration is proposed between children's theory of mind and source monitoring that may help to explain early developmental changes in suggestibility. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's understanding of interpretive diversity between different-age listeners.

Tested children's understanding of interpretive diversity by assessing their attributions of knowledge to a mother and a preverbal baby, who both had access to an informative verbal message. In Exp 1, most children between ages 4 and 8 yrs overattributed knowledge to the preverbal baby after an informative message. Exps 1a and 1b demonstrated that overattributions were not due to conflating the speaker's intent to inform with the informativeness of the message, nor were they due to overestimating babies' limited knowledge. In Exp 2, 6- and 8-yr-olds acknowledged interpretive differences between the baby and adult listener if the message was not obviously informative. It is concluded that children do not readily view individual differences as related to interpretive differences, especially in the absence of cues inherent to a message that might suggest that the message has multiple interpretations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's understanding of promising: methodological considerations

In her inceptive study of promising, Astington (1988) found that five-year-olds failed to distinguish promises from predictions when judging story characters' utterances. Instead, their responses were based on whether the promised event had actually occurred. There is reason to believe, however, that the children's poor performance was an artefact of Astington's procedures. We tested this possibility with 32 children (mean age 5;8: range 5;7-6;2) by including several variations of Astington's procedures, but found no effects on the pattern of results. This suggests that Astington's findings are an accurate reflection of the developmental course of knowledge about promising.     

Young children's understanding of the cognitive verb forget

Investigation of children's understanding of the cognitive verb forget has shown that young children do not consider the role of prior knowledge when using this verb. Thus, someone may be said to have forgotten a fact despite not ever having previously known it. However, forget can also be used to refer to a failure to recall a prior intention. Three experiments examined the role of prior intention as well as prior knowledge in the comprehension of forget by 160 young children aged four to eight years. The results showed that children initially have two interpretations of forget: as an unfulfilled desire rather than a failure to recall a prior intention, and as a state of not knowing rather than a failure to recall prior knowledge. Explanations for the late comprehension of forget are discussed in terms of representation of knowledge and intention, processing capacity and exposure to pragmatic usages.     

The influence of language and socioeconomic status on children's understanding of false belief.

Study 1 investigated whether differences in the lexical explicitness with which languages express false belief influence children's performance on standard false belief tasks. Preschoolers speaking languages with explicit terms (Turkish and Puerto Rican Spanish) were compared with preschoolers speaking languages without explicit terms (Brazilian Portuguese and English) on questions assessing false belief understanding either specifically (the think question) or more generally (the look for question). Lexical explicitness influenced responses to the think question only. Study 2 replicated Study I with groups of both speakers differing in socioeconomic status (SES). A local effect of explicitness was found again as well as a more general influence of SES. The findings are discussed with regard to possible relations among language, SES, and understanding of mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's understanding of division: The relationship between division terms in a noncomputational task.

The authors investigated development of the concept of division in young children. Experiment 1 examined whether children who can share are able to understand the inverse divisor–quotient relationship in partitive division tasks when asked to judge the relative size of 2 shared sets. Experiment 2 investigated whether young children understand the same inverse relation in quotitive tasks in which they were asked to judge the relative number of sets to be formed. The ability to compare share-outs and to take into account the inverse divisor–quotient relationship was present in approximately half of the 6-year-olds; age improvements were significant between 5 and 7 years. Partitive tasks, which are more similar to sharing, were easier than quotitive tasks, which seem to involve the coordination between sharing and part-whole concepts. This is evidence that children's initial understanding of division might be based on the action schema of sharing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influences of intentional and unintentional forgetting on false memories.

In 2 experiments, we examined the interplay of 2 types of memory errors: forgetting and false memory--errors of omission and commission, respectively. We examined the effects of 2 manipulations known to inhibit retrieval of studied words--directed forgetting and part--list cuing--on the false recall of an unstudied "critical" word following study of its 15 strongest associates. Participants cued to forget the 1st of 2nd studied lists before studying the 2nd recalled fewer List 1 words but intruded the missing critical word more often than did participants cued to remember both lists. By contrast, providing some studied words as cues during recall reduced both recall of the remaining studied words and intrusions of the critical word. The results suggest that forgetting can increase or decrease false memories, depending on whether such forgetting reflects impaired access to an entire episode or retrieval competition among elements of an episode. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of maternal negativity and of early and recent recurrent depressive disorder on children's false belief understanding.

Research has shown that children of depressed mothers are at risk for problems in a variety of developmental domains; however, little is known about the effects of maternal depression on children's emerging understanding of false beliefs. In this study, 3 false belief tasks were administered to 5-year-old children whose mothers had either met criteria for major depressive disorder within the first 20 months of the child's life (n = 91) or had never been depressed (n = 50). Significant difficulties in performance were found among the children of depressed mothers, especially those whose mothers had experienced early and recent recurrent depressive disorder. Regardless of diagnostic status, children whose mothers exhibited negativity during problem-solving tasks administered at an earlier developmental period also were less likely to demonstrate false belief understanding. These effects remained even after child verbal ability was controlled. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's conception of distance.

Whether young children conceive of distance as rigid intervals of extent seems central to their larger understanding of space and to their measurement abilities (Piaget, Inhelder, & Szeminska, 1960). A sensitive test of children's conception of distance would require them to reason about distance rather than simply visually to estimate displayed lengths. Therefore, we investigated preschoolers' understanding of two distance principles. The direct–indirect principle is the idea that a straight route between two points is always the shortest. The same–plus principle is the idea that if two routes are the same up to a point, but then only one route continues, that route is longest. In two experiments, 32 children from 3? to 5 years old were given principle-relevant and principle-irrelevant problems that required comparison of two screened routes. Children performed better on principle-relevant than on principle-irrelevant screened tasks (74% vs. 19% correct). Their performances support the conclusion that even young children conceive of distance as intervals of fixed extent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's understanding of other people's beliefs and feelings and their connected communication with friends.

Links between experimentally assessed social understanding and naturalistically observed verbal communication between friends were investigated in a study of 38 young children. Affective perspective-taking and false-belief tasks were administered to the children at 40 months of age. Connected communication between friends (average length of connected episodes, average length of play episodes, and average length of pretend episodes) was coded from transcribed audiotaped conversations recorded from a 45-min observation when the children were 47 months of age. Performance on both social understanding tasks was significantly associated with connected communication between friends. Implications for the prognostic utility of social understanding tasks for regulation of real-life interactions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's numerical use of number words: Counting in many-to-one situations.

Assessed preschooler's use of counting in many-to-one situations in 2 tasks. Children's performances on these tasks demonstrate that, given a perceptually available set of dolls, children can use number words to determine the quantity of a hidden or nonexistent set of items in a known ratio to the present set (2 or 3 for each doll). Children's appropriate use of counting in these many-to-one situations develops during the period from 4 to 5.5 yrs old. The task demands and the strategies children used in these tasks are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of intentional forgetting in reducing children's retroactive interference.

Preschool and kindergarten children's retention of stories was examined in the presence of interfering information and instructions to forget. Children learned 2 stories and, 24 hr later, were asked to recall the 1st or 2nd story learned. Some of the children were instructed, either following acquisition or just prior to the retention test to forget the 2nd, or interfering, story. A model was used to isolate storage and retrieval effects, and the results showed that (a) retroactive interference affected both storage- and retrieval-based forgetting rates for the younger children but only storage-based forgetting rates for the older children, (b) intentional forgetting reduced retroactive interference primarily by attenuating storage-based forgetting regardless of age, (c) intentional forgetting instructions were effective only at acquisition for preschoolers but at both acquisition and retention for kindergarteners, and (d) all children recalled the to-be-forgotten story as well as they recalled the to-be-remembered story. These results are interpreted in terms of reorganization and distinctiveness effects in storage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

School-age children's understanding of explanation adequacy.

Assessed developmental differences in school-age children's evaluations of explanations in mathematics peer-group interactions. 31 3rd-and 5th-grade students were shown videotapes of simulated small-group interactions involving 4 types of replies to requests—answer, procedure, demonstration, and justification. Ss rated each reply type and provided justifications for half of their ratings. 60 adult ratings were obtained for assessing their responses to a written version of the stimuli. Results reveal differences between reply types to requests for information and an interaction between reply type and grade. Adults' ratings paralleled children's. Only 5th graders varied their justifications across reply type. 5th graders provided more content-specific justifications. Suggestions are made for practice and research involving communicative skills related to learning. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's (Homo sapiens) understanding of knowledge formation in themselves and others.

Three- and 4-yr-old children were tested for comprehension of knowledge formation. In Exp 1, 34 Ss watched as a surprise was hidden under 1 of 4 obscured cups. The experimenter then pointed to the cup. All children searched under the correct cup, but no 3-yr-olds (in contrast to most 4-yr-olds) could explain how they knew where to look. Ss then discriminated between simultaneous pointing by 2 adults, one who had hidden a surprise and one who had left the room before the surprise was hidden. Most 4-yr-olds (but no 3-yr-olds) showed clear discrimination between the adults. In Exp 2, 16 Ss were tested with procedures designed to make the source of their own knowledge more obvious, but this had no effect on performance. It is concluded that studies using very similar procedures with chimpanzees and rhesus macaques were measuring an ability (or inability) to understand how knowledge states form. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Young children's use of syntactic cues to learn proper names and count nouns.

In 6 experiments, 144 toddlers were tested in groups ranging in mean age from 20 to 37 months. In all experiments, children learned a novel label for a doll or a stuffed animal. The label was modeled syntactically as either a count noun (e.g., "This is a ZAV") or a proper name (e.g., "This is ZAV"). The object was then moved to a new location in front of the child, and a second identical-looking object was placed nearby. The children's task was to choose 1 of the 2 objects as a referent for the novel word. By 24 months, both girls (Experiment 2) and boys (Experiment 5) were significantly more likely to select the labeled object if they heard a proper name than if they heard a count noun. At 20 months, neither girls (Experiments 1 and 6) nor boys (Experiment 1) demonstrated this effect. By their 2nd birthdays, children can use syntactic information to distinguish appropriately between labels for individual objects and those for object categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)