How children come to (not) detect and apply multiple functions for objects: Rethinking perseveration and functional fixedness.

Although humans acquire sophisticated and flexible tool-use skills rapidly throughout childhood, young children and adults still show difficulties using the same object for different functions, manifesting in, for example, perseveration or functional fixedness. This paper presents a novel model proposing bottom-up processes taking place during the acquisition of tool-use abilities through active interaction with objects, resulting in two kinds of cognitive representations of an object: a lower-level, action-centered representation and a higher-level, purpose-centered one. In situations requiring the use of an object to attain a goal, the purpose-centered representation is activated quickly, allowing for an immediate detection of suitable tools.

Infants differentiate between successful and failed communication in a false-belief context.

Communication is based on social interaction, that is, interlocutors sharing attention to the intentions that they communicate about. In this study, we asked whether infants are aware of the fact that for information to be transferred, both interlocutors need to be present and share attention. Using a violation-of-expectation paradigm created to test infants' understanding of others' false beliefs, we asked whether 18-month-olds (n = 84) understood that correcting an agent's false belief via communication requires that the agent discerns the verbal statement.

A meta-analytic approach to the association between inhibitory control and parent-reported behavioral adjustment in typically-developing children: Differentiating externalizing and internalizing behavior problems.

Impairments in inhibitory control (IC) are traditionally seen as a vital aspect in the emergence and course of maladaptive behavior across early childhood. However, it is currently unclear whether this view applies to both the externalizing and internalizing domain of parent-reported behavioral adjustment. Furthermore, past (meta-analytic) developmental research and theory characterizing this association have largely neglected the vast heterogeneity of IC measures and conceptualizations.

Children understand communication intuitively, but indirect communication makes them think twice-Evidence from pupillometry and looking patterns.

Interpreting a speaker's communicative acts is a challenge children face permanently in everyday life. In doing so, they seem to understand direct communicative acts more easily than indirect communicative acts. The current study investigated which step in the processing of communicative acts might cause difficulties in understanding indirect communication.

Fourteen-month-olds' imitation is influenced more strongly by a model's competence than by a model's certainty.

Research has shown that infants are more likely to learn from certain and competent models than from uncertain and incompetent models. However, it is unknown which of these cues to a model's reliability infants consider more important. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether 14-month-old infants (n = 35) imitate and adopt tool choices selectively from an uncertain but competent compared to a certain but incompetent model.

12- to 14-month-olds expect unconstrained agents to act efficiently: Event-related potential (ERP) evidence from the head-touch paradigm.

Behavioral research has shown that 12- but not 9-month-olds imitate an unusual and inefficient action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) more when the model's hands are free. Rational-imitation accounts suggest that infants evaluate actions based on the rationality principle, that is, they expect people to choose efficient means to achieve a goal. Accordingly, infants' expectations should be violated when observing inefficient actions.

A model's natural group membership affects over-imitation in 6-year-olds.

The phenomenon of "over-imitation"-the copying of causally irrelevant actions-has influenced research of the past decade. Yet, the mechanisms underlying and factors affecting over-imitation are still under debate. This study aimed to contribute to this debate by investigating the role of the model's natural group membership in children's tendency to imitate irrelevant actions using a two-phase design.

The role of executive functions in kindergarteners' persistent and non-persistent behaviour.

The aim of the study was to examine whether cognitive skills are related to persistence. Thus, children's (N = 157, mean age: 5.9 years) persistent and non-persistent behaviours (i.

Rational imitation declines within the second year of life: Changes in the function of imitation.

Cultural learning plays a crucial role in enabling children to fit into their social community by mastering culture-specific habits. Infants learn actions via imitation, and they seem to be sensitive to the context in which a model demonstrates these. They imitate rationally by copying unusual means to achieve a goal more when the model chooses this means voluntarily compared with when some constraints force the model to do so.

Feedback Enhances Preschoolers' Performance in an Inhibitory Control Task.

Accomplishing inhibition tasks requires not only inhibitory skills but also goal maintenance. The present study aimed to disentangle goal maintenance from inhibition. Therefore, we experimentally manipulated goal-maintenance demands by means of feedback.

Corrigendum: Reduced Mu Power in Response to Unusual Actions Is Context-Dependent in 1-Year-Olds.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.

Fourteen-month-olds selectively search for and use information depending on the familiarity of the informant in both laboratory and home contexts.

Infants are selective in their learning from others. However, there is only very limited research on the possible factors that shape this selectivity, especially when it comes to the impact of infants' familiarity with the informant and the context. The current study investigated whether 14-month-olds preferred to receive and use information provided by an unfamiliar informant (experimenter) compared with a familiar informant (parent) and whether this pattern depended on the context (home vs.

Inventing a new measurement for inhibitory control in preschoolers.

One of the most prominent tasks to measure spatial-conflict inhibitory control in preschoolers is the windows task (Russell et al., 1991, Br. J.

Reduced Mu Power in Response to Unusual Actions Is Context-Dependent in 1-Year-Olds.

During social interactions infants predict and evaluate other people's actions. Previous behavioral research found that infants' imitation of others' actions depends on these evaluations and is context-dependent: 1-year-olds predominantly imitated an unusual action (turning on a lamp with one's forehead) when the model's hands were free compared to when the model's hands were occupied or restrained. In the present study, we adapted this behavioral paradigm to a neurophysiological study measuring infants' brain activity while observing usual and unusual actions via electroencephalography.

The impact of resource valence on children's other-regarding preferences.

Given its importance for the emergence of intergroup conflict, the development of other-regarding preferences toward in-group and out-group members has received increasing attention from various disciplines. The present study investigates children's other-regarding preferences toward in-group and out-group members when allocating resources with positive and negative valence. The 6- and 8-year-olds' (N = 92) task was to allocate resources to themselves versus to an in-group or an out-group member.

Infants' and adults' looking behavior does not indicate perceptual distraction for constrained modelled actions - An eye-tracking study.

When observing a novel action, infants pay attention to the model's constraints when deciding whether to imitate this action or not. Gergely et al. (2002) found that more 14-month-olds copied a model's use of her head to operate a lamp when she used her head while her hands were free than when she had to use this means because it was the only means available to her (i.

Great apes distinguish true from false beliefs in an interactive helping task.

Understanding the behavior of others in a wide variety of circumstances requires an understanding of their psychological states. Humans' nearest primate relatives, the great apes, understand many psychological states of others, for example, perceptions, goals, and desires. However, so far there is little evidence that they possess the key marker of advanced human social cognition: an understanding of false beliefs.

The influence of a bystander agent's beliefs on children's and adults' decision-making process.

The ability to attribute and represent others' mental states (e.g., beliefs; so-called "theory of mind") is essential for participation in human social interaction.

Children's understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks.

De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858-1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker's epistemic attitude toward that proposition.

Infant and adult pupil dilation in response to unexpected sounds.

Surprisingly occurring sounds outside the focus of attention can involuntarily capture attention. This study focuses on the impact of deviant sounds on the pupil size as a marker of auditory involuntary attention in infants. We presented an oddball paradigm including four types of deviant sounds within a sequence of repeated standard sounds to 14-month-old infants and to adults.

What you get is what you believe: eighteen-month-olds demonstrate belief understanding in an unexpected-identity task.

Based on recent findings of implicit studies, researchers have claimed that even infants can understand others' false beliefs. However, it is unclear whether infants are able to understand others' belief about an object's identity when this object can be represented in different ways. In a novel interactive unexpected-identity task derived from the appearance-reality paradigm, 18-month-olds helped an adult to achieve her goal based on the adult's belief about an object's identity.

The ontogeny of the motivation that underlies in-group bias.

Humans demonstrate a clear bias toward members of their own group over members of other groups in a variety of ways. It has been argued that the motivation underlying this in-group bias in adults may be favoritism toward one's own group (in-group love), derogation of the out-group (out-group hate), or both. Although some studies have demonstrated in-group bias among children and infants, nothing is known about the underlying motivations of this bias.

An integrative model of rational imitation in infancy.

It has been proposed that infants selectively imitate based on a rational evaluation of an observed action (Gergely, Bekkering, & Király, 2002). This rational-imitation account has been rejected based on findings which suggested that infant imitation depends on: (a) the similarity between the infant's and the model's body posture; and (b) the presence of action effects (Paulus, Hunnius, Vissers, & Bekkering, 2011). Despite this controversy, we show that both accounts have received empirical support from different fields of research.