Published in Developmental psychology
Sixty-eight 3-year-olds received a standard appearance-reality task along with either a trick task, in which the appearance question was placed in the context of a deceptive game, or a reduced information processing task, in which a dual object (e.g., a sponge-rock) was presented along with an object that matched the dual object's identity (a spong...
Published in Developmental psychology
At what age and in what ways do children distinguish deductive and inductive problems? In Experiment 1, students from kindergarten and from Grades 2, 4, and 6 were presented with deductive or inductive inference problems and asked to draw an inference and rate their confidence. By 4th grade, confidence ratings for deductive problems were higher tha...
Published in Developmental psychology
A longitudinal study investigated the relation between infant expectations and reaction time (RT) and childhood IQ and RT. Measures of visual anticipation and visual RT were taken at 3.5 months and 4 years of age. In addition, manual RT and verbal and performance IQ were measured at 4 years of age. Infant visual RT correlated reliably with childhoo...
Published in Developmental psychology
This study evaluated a social process model describing how aggression and withdrawal lead to negative social self-perceptions. The model posited both direct (i.e., cognitions associated with withdrawal) and indirect (i.e., mediations of negative peer status and peer experiences) influences. Eight- to 10-year-old children (n = 793) completed peer as...
Published in Developmental psychology
Although there is substantial evidence that 30-month-old children can reason about other people's desires, little is known about the developmental antecedents of this ability. A food-request procedure was devised to explore this understanding in 14- and 18-month-olds. Children observed an experimenter expressing disgust as she tasted 1 type of food...
Published in Developmental psychology
We examined whether children's (Grades 2-6) causality beliefs about school performance show similar developmental profiles across 6 distinct sociocultural settings (Los Angeles, n = 657; Tokyo, n = 817; East Berlin, n = 313; West Berlin, n = 517; Moscow, n = 551; Prague, n = 768) with the Means-Ends subscale of the tripartite Control, Agency, and M...
Published in Developmental psychology
Fourth and 5th graders (N = 119) were individually interviewed regarding their reactions to completing group-administered, positive and negative peer nomination techniques. Results were consistent with previous findings of no obvious harm; but, additional, unique information regarding children's discussions was identified. For example, 7 children r...
Published in Developmental psychology
This study examined the effect of attention on 3- to 6-month-olds responses to briefly exposed visual stimuli. In Study I, stimuli presented at 2.5 or 5.0 s resulted in a familiarity preference in a subsequent paired-comparison procedure. A novelty preference was found with 10.0- or 20.0-s exposure durations. In Study 2, a Sesame Street movie elici...
Published in Developmental psychology
Evidence of the operation of a biological theory might be found in children's distinction between mental (emotional) and bodily (illness) reactions to contamination. Study 1 explored whether children see emotions as voluntary but illness as outside of intentional control. Three- and 5-year-olds judged that simple volitions were insufficient to alte...
Published in Developmental psychology
This study compared teaching and learning measures of 16 mother-child and sibling dyads playing a picture categorization game. Target children (mean age = 3 years 11 months) participated in 2 separate sessions, 1 with their mother and 1 with their older sibling (mean age = 6 years 11 months). Although siblings' teaching styles directed target child...
