Neural correlates of preschoolers' passive-viewing false belief: Insights into continuity and change and the function of right temporoparietal activity in theory of mind development.

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.

Mentalistic and normative frameworks in children's explanations of others' behaviors.

As they learn to navigate the social world, children construct frameworks to interpret others' behavior. The present studies examined two such frameworks: a mentalistic framework, which construes behavior as driven by internal mental states; and a normative framework, which presumes people act in accordance with social norms. Participants included 101 children (ages 4, 7, and 10; 81% White; 41% female) and 35 adults (66% female) tested in the northeastern United States from 2019 to 2021.

The Origins of Theory of Mind in Infant Social Cognition: Investigating Longitudinal Pathways from Intention Understanding and Joint Attention to Preschool Theory of Mind.

A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current study aimed to extend this literature by (a) recruiting a large sample of participants ( = 116; 53 boys; 63 girls; all U.

A longitudinal study of the differential social-cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors.

A growing body of work has documented the emergence of instrumental helping and sharing in the second year of life; however, less is known about mechanisms that underlie development and production of prosocial behavior. The current study took a longitudinal approach to explore whether the origins of prosocial behaviors can be traced back to foundational social-cognitive capacities emerging in infancy. In a sample of 90 children, longitudinal relations were examined between intention understanding and joint attention measured in infancy (8-12 months) and later instrumental helping and sharing behavior assessed in the toddler years (18-25 months).

Intentional action processing across the transition to crawling: Does the experience of self-locomotion impact infants' understanding of intentional actions?

Motor developmental milestones in infancy, such as the transition to self-locomotion, have cascading implications for infants' social and cognitive development. The current studies aimed to add to this literature by exploring whether and how crawling experience impacts a key social-cognitive milestone achieved in infancy: the development of intentional action understanding. Study 1 used a cross-sectional, age-held-constant design to examine whether locomotor (n = 36) and prelocomotor (n = 36) infants differ in their ability to process a failed intentional reaching action.

Triadic interactions support infants' emerging understanding of intentional actions.

Infants' understanding of the intentional nature of human action develops gradually across the first year of life. A key question is what mechanisms drive changes in this foundational social-cognitive ability. The current studies explored the hypothesis that triadic interactions in which infants coordinate attention between a social partner and an object of mutual interest promote infants' developing understanding of others as intentional agents.

Changes in Beliefs About Category Homogeneity and Variability Across Childhood.

Effective category-based induction requires understanding that categories include both fundamental similarities between members and important variation. This article explores 4- to 11-year-olds' (n = 207) and adults' (n = 49) intuitions about this balance between within-category homogeneity and variability using a novel induction task in which participants predict the distribution of a property among members of a novel category. Across childhood, children learned to recognize variability within categories-showing increasing sensitivity to the role of property type and domain in constraining inferences.

Infants' social and motor experience and the emerging understanding of intentional actions.

During the first year of life, infants possess some of the key social-cognitive abilities required for success in a social world: Infants interpret others' actions in terms of their intentions and can use this understanding prospectively to generate predictions about others' behavior. Exactly how these foundational abilities develop is currently unknown. The goal of this study was to shed light on the developmental mechanisms underlying changes in infants' understanding of intentional actions by documenting relations between infants' intention understanding and other emerging social (joint attention) and motor (means-end and self-locomotion) abilities.

Children's Developing Intuitions About the Truth Conditions and Implications of Novel Generics Versus Quantified Statements.

Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by all, most, and some. Results reveal that, like adults, preschoolers (a) recognize that generics have flexible truth conditions and are capable of representing a wide range of prevalence levels; and (b) interpret novel generics as having near-universal prevalence implications.

Three-year-olds' theories of mind in actions and words.

Understanding observable behavior by considering mental representations is central to social cognition. Research reveals quite different developmental trajectories for this ability depending on whether tasks assess implicit or explicit theory of mind (ToM). Yet, how to define implicit vs.

Infants' goal anticipation during failed and successful reaching actions.

The ability to interpret and predict the actions of others is crucial to social interaction and to social, cognitive, and linguistic development. The current study provided a strong test of this predictive ability by assessing (1) whether infants are capable of prospectively processing actions that fail to achieve their intended outcome, and (2) how infants respond to events in which their initial predictions are not confirmed. Using eye tracking, 8-month-olds, 10-month-olds, and adults watched an actor repeatedly reach over a barrier to either successfully or unsuccessfully retrieve a ball.

Generic Language Use Reveals Domain Differences in Children's Expectations about Animal and Artifact Categories.

The goal of the present study was to explore domain differences in young children's expectations about the structure of animal and artifact categories. We examined 5-year-olds' and adults' use of category-referring generic noun phrases (e.g.

Do lions have manes? For children, generics are about kinds rather than quantities.

Generic statements (e.g., "Lions have manes") make claims about kinds (e.

Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications.

Generic statements (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") express generalizations about categories.

Fast-mapping placeholders: Using words to talk about kinds.

Fast-mapping is the ability to acquire a word rapidly on the basis of minimal information. As proposed by Carey (1978), we assume that children are able to achieve fast-mapping because their initial word meanings are skeletal placeholders that will be extended gradually over time. In this paper we propose that a notion of "kind" is fundamental to children's initial mappings for object labels.

Theory-based considerations influence the interpretation of generic sentences.

Under what circumstances do people agree that a kind-referring generic sentence (e.g., "Swans are beautiful") is true? We hypothesized that theory-based considerations are sufficient, independently of prevalence/frequency information, to lead to acceptance of a generic statement.

Early intention understandings that are common to primates predict children's later theory of mind.

Intention understanding emerges early in human development, manifest in deep and robust fashions even in infants. Overlapping intention understandings, encompassing agents as intentional actors and experiencers, are evident in nonhuman primates in more limited fashions. Intention understandings, of the sort shared by infants and nonhuman primates, predict the more comprehensive theory-of-mind understandings of older children.

Differences in preschoolers' and adults' use of generics about novel animals and artifacts: a window onto a conceptual divide.

Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts.

You can't always get what you want: infants understand failed goal-directed actions.

At what age do infants understand that goals exist independently of the actions that result from them? Exploring infants' understanding of failed intentional actions-when the goal of the action is unfulfilled and thus not apparent in the actor's movements-is a critical step in answering this question. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we assessed when infants understand that a failed intentional action is goal directed and whether an understanding of successful intentional actions (actions that do overtly attain their goals) precedes an understanding of failed intentional actions. Results demonstrated that 10- and 12-month-olds recognized the goal directedness of both successful and failed reaching actions.

Focusing on the relation: fewer exemplars facilitate children's initial verb learning and extension.

One of the most prominent theories for why children struggle to learn verbs is that verb learning requires the abstraction of relations between an object and its action (Gentner, 2003). Two hypotheses suggest how children extract relations to extend a novel verb: (1) seeing many different exemplars allows children to detect the invariant relation between actions in different contexts (Gentner, 2003), and (2) repetition of fewer exemplars allows children to move beyond the entities involved to extract the relation (Kersten & Smith, 2002). We tested 2 1/2- and 3-year-olds' ability to extend a novel verb after viewing the repetition of one novel actor compared to four different actors performing a novel action.

Action speaks louder than words: young children differentially weight perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn verbs.

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3).