Interactions Between Knowledge and Testimony in Children's Reality-Status Judgments.

In two studies we attempt to capture the information processing abilities underlying children's reality-status judgments. Forty 5- to 6-year-olds and 53 7- to 8-year-olds heard about novel entities (animals) that varied in their fit with children's world knowledge. After hearing about each entity, children could either guess reality status immediately or listen to testimony first.

Development of the use of conversational cues to assess reality status.

In this study we assessed children's ability to use information overheard in other people's conversations to judge the reality status of a novel entity. Three- to 9-year-old children (N = 101) watched video clips in which two adults conversed casually about a novel being. Videos contained statements that either explicitly denied, explicitly affirmed, or implicitly acknowledged the entity's existence.

Knowing beans: human mirror mechanisms revealed through motor adaptation.

Human mirror mechanisms (MMs) respond during both performed and observed action and appear to underlie action goal recognition. We introduce a behavioral procedure for discovering and clarifying functional MM properties: blindfolded participants repeatedly move beans either toward or away from themselves to induce motor adaptation. Then, the bias for perceiving direction of ambiguous visual movement in depth is measured.