Intuitive Sociology: Children Recognize Decision-Making Structures and Prefer Groups With Less-Concentrated Power.

From an early age, children recognize that people belong to social groups. However, not all groups are structured in the same way. The current study asked whether children recognize and distinguish among different decision-making structures.

Rationalization may improve predictability rather than accuracy.

We present a theoretical and an empirical challenge to Cushman's claim that rationalization is adaptive because it allows humans to extract more accurate beliefs from our non-rational motivations for behavior. Rationalization sometimes generates more adaptive decisions by making our beliefs about the world less accurate. We suggest that the most important adaptive advantage of rationalization is instead that it increases our predictability (and therefore attractiveness) as potential partners in cooperative social interactions.

Toddlers prefer those who win but not when they win by force.

Social hierarchies occur across human societies, so all humans must navigate them. Infants can detect when one individual outranks another, but it is unknown whether they approach others based on their social status. This paper presents a series of seven experiments investigating whether toddlers prefer high- or low-ranking individuals.

Infants Choose Those Who Defer in Conflicts.

For humans and other social species, social status matters: it determines who wins access to contested resources, territory, and mates [1-11]. Human infants are sensitive to dominance status cues [12, 13]. They expect conflicts to be won by larger individuals [14], those with more allies [15], and those with a history of winning [16-18].

Exploring the relation between people's theories of intelligence and beliefs about brain development.

A person's belief about whether intelligence can change (called their implicit theory of intelligence) predicts something about that person's thinking and behavior. People who believe intelligence is fixed (called entity theorists) attribute failure to traits (i.e.

Is there really a link between exact-number knowledge and approximate number system acuity in young children?

Although everyone perceives approximate numerosities, some people make more accurate estimates than others. The accuracy of this estimation is called approximate number system (ANS) acuity. Recently, several studies have reported that individual differences in young children's ANS acuity are correlated with their knowledge of exact numbers such as the word 'six' (Mussolin et al.

On the relation between grammatical number and cardinal numbers in development.

This mini-review focuses on the question of how the grammatical number system of a child's language may help the child learn the meanings of cardinal number words (e.g., "one" and "two").

Are bilingual children better at ignoring perceptually misleading information? A novel test.

Does speaking more than one language help a child perform better on certain types of cognitive tasks? One possibility is that bilingualism confers either specific or general cognitive advantages on tasks that require selective attention to one dimension over another (e.g. Bialystok, ; Hilchey & Klein, ).

Children's number-line estimation shows development of measurement skills (not number representations).

Children's understanding of numbers is often assessed using a number-line task, where the child is shown a line labeled with 0 at one end and a higher number (e.g., 100) at the other end.

The idea of an exact number: children's understanding of cardinality and equinumerosity.

Understanding what numbers are means knowing several things. It means knowing how counting relates to numbers (called the cardinal principle or cardinality); it means knowing that each number is generated by adding one to the previous number (called the successor function or succession), and it means knowing that all and only sets whose members can be placed in one-to-one correspondence have the same number of items (called exact equality or equinumerosity). A previous study (Sarnecka & Carey, 2008) linked children's understanding of cardinality to their understanding of succession for the numbers five and six.

A number of options: rationalist, constructivist, and Bayesian insights into the development of exact-number concepts.

The question of how human beings acquire exact-number concepts has interested cognitive developmentalists since the time of Piaget. The answer will owe something to both the rationalist and constructivist traditions. On the one hand, some aspects of numerical cognition (e.

Number-concept acquisition and general vocabulary development.

How is number-concept acquisition related to overall language development? Experiments 1 and 2 measured number-word knowledge and general vocabulary in a total of 59 children, ages 30-60 months. A strong correlation was found between number-word knowledge and vocabulary, independent of the child's age, contrary to previous results (D. Ansari et al.

An Excel sheet for inferring children's number-knower levels from give-N data.

Number-knower levels are a series of stages of number concept development in early childhood. A child's number-knower level is typically assessed using the give-N task. Although the task procedure has been highly refined, the standard ways of analyzing give-N data remain somewhat crude.

Find the picture of eight turtles: a link between children's counting and their knowledge of number word semantics.

An essential part of understanding number words (e.g., eight) is understanding that all number words refer to the dimension of experience we call numerosity.

Number-knower levels in young children: insights from Bayesian modeling.

Lee and Sarnecka (2010) developed a Bayesian model of young children's behavior on the Give-N test of number knowledge. This paper presents two new extensions of the model, and applies the model to new data. In the first extension, the model is used to evaluate competing theories about the conceptual knowledge underlying children's behavior.

A Model of Knower-Level Behavior in Number-Concept Development.

We develop and evaluate a model of behavior on the Give-N task, a commonly-used measure of young children's number knowledge. Our model uses the knower-level theory of how children represent numbers. To produce behavior on the Give-N task, the model assumes children start out with a base-rate that make some answers more likely a priori than others, but is updated on each experimental trial in a way that depends on the interaction between the experimenter's request and the child's knower-level.

Levels of number knowledge during early childhood.

Researchers have long disagreed about whether number concepts are essentially continuous (unchanging) or discontinuous over development. Among those who take the discontinuity position, there is disagreement about how development proceeds. The current study addressed these questions with new quantitative analyses of children's incorrect responses on the Give-N task.

How counting represents number: what children must learn and when they learn it.

This study compared 2- to 4-year-olds who understand how counting works (cardinal-principle-knowers) to those who do not (subset-knowers), in order to better characterize the knowledge itself. New results are that (1) Many children answer the question "how many" with the last word used in counting, despite not understanding how counting works; (2) Only children who have mastered the cardinal principle, or are just short of doing so, understand that adding objects to a set means moving forward in the numeral list whereas subtracting objects mean going backward; and finally (3) Only cardinal-principle-knowers understand that adding exactly 1 object to a set means moving forward exactly 1 word in the list, whereas subset-knowers do not understand the unit of change.

Generic Language in Parent-Child Conversations.

Generic knowledge concerns kinds of things (e.g., birds fly; a chair is for sitting; gold is a metal).

From grammatical number to exact numbers: early meanings of 'one', 'two', and 'three' in English, Russian, and Japanese.

This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words 'one,' 'two,' and 'three.' First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use. Then young children in the USA, Russia, and Japan were tested on Counting and Give-N tasks.

Six does not just mean a lot: preschoolers see number words as specific.

This paper examines what children believe about unmapped number words - those number words whose exact meanings children have not yet learned. In Study 1, 31 children (ages 2-10 to 4-2) judged that the application of five and six changes when numerosity changes, although they did not know that equal sets must have the same number word. In Study 2, 15 children (ages 2-5 to 3-6) judged that six plus more is no longer six, but that a lot plus more is still a lot.