The COVID-19 pandemic and social cognitive outcomes in early childhood.

The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns led to sweeping changes in the everyday lives of children and families, including school closures, remote work and learning, and social distancing. To date no study has examined whether these profound changes in young children's day to day social interactions impacted the development of social cognition skills in early childhood. To address this question, we compared the performance of two cohorts of 3.

The influence of language input on 3-year-olds' learning about novel social categories.

There is considerable variability in the social categories that children essentialize and the types of expectations children form about these categories, suggesting children's essentialist beliefs are shaped by environmental input. Prior studies have shown that exposure to generic statements about a social category promotes essentialist beliefs in 4.5- to 8-year-old children.

Financial concern reduces child directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample.

Socioeconomic status predicts the quantity and nature of child-directed speech that parents produce. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain unclear. This study investigated whether the cognitive load imposed by resource scarcity suppresses parent talk by examining time-dependent variation in child-directed speech in a socioeconomically diverse sample.

Associations Between Sleep and Mental Health Among Latina Adolescent Mothers: The Role of Social Support.

Adolescent mothers experience poorer sleep than adult mothers, and Latina adolescent mothers are at greater risk of postpartum depression compared with other racial/ethnic groups. However, social support may be protective against the negative effects of poor sleep in this population. The current study examined (1) associations between the quality and quantity of Latina adolescent mothers' sleep and mental health (depressive symptoms and anxiety), and (2) whether social support buffered the effects of poor sleep on mental health.

2.5-year-olds succeed in identity and location elicited-response false-belief tasks with adequate response practice.

Researchers have argued that traditional elicited-response false-belief tasks involve considerable processing demands and hence underestimate children's false-belief understanding. Consistent with this claim, Setoh et al. (2016) recently found that when processing demands were sufficiently reduced, children could succeed in an elicited-response task as early as 2.

The Developmental Origins of Syntactic Bootstrapping.

Children use syntax to learn verbs, in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account proposes that syntactic bootstrapping begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event. Equipped with this bias, children interpret the number of noun phrases accompanying a new verb as evidence about the semantic predicate-argument structure of the sentence, and therefore about the meaning of the verb.

The relationship between parental mental-state language and 2.5-year-olds' performance on a nontraditional false-belief task.

A growing body of evidence suggests that children succeed in nontraditional false-belief tasks in the first years of life. However, few studies have examined individual differences in infants' and toddlers' performance on these tasks. Here we investigated whether parental use of mental-state language (i.

Early False-Belief Understanding.

Intense controversy surrounds the question of when children first understand that others can hold false beliefs. Results from traditional tasks suggest that false-belief understanding does not emerge until about 4 years of age and constitutes a major developmental milestone in social cognition. By contrast, results from nontraditional tasks, which have steadily accumulated over the past 10 years, suggest that false-belief understanding is already present in infants (under age 2 years) and toddlers (age 2-3 years) and thus forms an integral part of social cognition from early in life.

Surprise! 20-month-old infants understand the emotional consequences of false beliefs.

Recent studies suggest that by the second year of life, infants can attribute false beliefs to agents. However, prior studies have largely focused on infants' ability to predict a mistaken agent's physical actions on objects. The present research investigated whether 20-month-old infants could also reason about belief-based emotional displays.

Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account.

It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by children's performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the 1st year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolers' performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks.

Two-and-a-half-year-olds succeed at a traditional false-belief task with reduced processing demands.

When tested with traditional false-belief tasks, which require answering a standard question about the likely behavior of an agent with a false belief, children perform below chance until age 4 y or later. When tested without such questions, however, children give evidence of false-belief understanding much earlier. Are traditional tasks difficult because they tap a more advanced form of false-belief understanding (fundamental-change view) or because they impose greater processing demands (processing-demands view)? Evidence that young children succeed at traditional false-belief tasks when processing demands are reduced would support the latter view.

Finding meaning in a noisy world: exploring the effects of referential ambiguity and competition on 2·5-year-olds' cross-situational word learning.

While recent studies suggest children can use cross-situational information to learn words, these studies involved minimal referential ambiguity, and the cross-situational evidence overwhelmingly favored a single referent for each word. Here we asked whether 2·5-year-olds could identify a noun's referent when the scene and cross-situational evidence were more ambiguous. Children saw four trials in which a novel word occurred with four novel objects; only one object consistently co-occurred with the word across trials.

Processing Demands Impact 3-Year-Olds' Performance in a Spontaneous-Response Task: New Evidence for the Processing-Load Account of Early False-Belief Understanding.

Prior to age four, children succeed in non-elicited-response false-belief tasks but fail elicited-response false-belief tasks. To explain this discrepancy, the processing-load account argues that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in infancy, as indicated by early success on non-elicited-response tasks, but that children's ability to demonstrate this capacity depends on the processing demands of the task and children's processing skills. When processing demands exceed young children's processing abilities, such as in standard elicited-response tasks, children fail despite their capacity to represent beliefs.

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy.

Adults routinely make sense of others' actions by inferring the mental states that underlie these actions. Over the past two decades, developmental researchers have made significant advances in understanding the origins of this ability in infancy. This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent's mental states and then use these mental states, together with a principle of rationality (and its corollaries of efficiency and consistency), to predict and interpret the agent's subsequent actions and to guide their own actions toward the agent.

Infants understand deceptive intentions to implant false beliefs about identity: New evidence for early mentalistic reasoning.

Are infants capable of representing false beliefs, as the mentalistic account of early psychological reasoning suggests, or are they incapable of doing so, as the minimalist account suggests? The present research sought to shed light on this debate by testing the minimalist claim that a signature limit of early psychological reasoning is a specific inability to understand false beliefs about identity: because of their limited representational capabilities, infants should be unable to make sense of situations where an agent mistakes one object for another, visually identical object. To evaluate this claim, three experiments examined whether 17-month-olds could reason about the actions of a deceptive agent who sought to implant in another agent a false belief about the identity of an object. In each experiment, a thief attempted to secretly steal a desirable rattling toy during its owner's absence by substituting a less desirable silent toy.

Do infants really expect agents to act efficiently? A critical test of the rationality principle.

Recent experiments have suggested that infants' expectations about the actions of agents are guided by a principle of rationality: In particular, infants expect agents to pursue their goals efficiently, expending as little effort as possible. However, these experiments have all presented infants with infrequent or odd actions, which leaves the results open to alternative interpretations and makes it difficult to determine whether infants possess a general expectation of efficiency. We devised a critical test of the rationality principle that did not involve infrequent or odd actions.

Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies.

The psychological capacity to recognize that others may hold and act on false beliefs has been proposed to reflect an evolved, species-typical adaptation for social reasoning in humans; however, controversy surrounds the developmental timing and universality of this trait. Cross-cultural studies using elicited-response tasks indicate that the age at which children begin to understand false beliefs ranges from 4 to 7 years across societies, whereas studies using spontaneous-response tasks with Western children indicate that false-belief understanding emerges much earlier, consistent with the hypothesis that false-belief understanding is a psychological adaptation that is universally present in early childhood. To evaluate this hypothesis, we used three spontaneous-response tasks that have revealed early false-belief understanding in the West to test young children in three traditional, non-Western societies: Salar (China), Shuar/Colono (Ecuador) and Yasawan (Fiji).

Children expect generic knowledge to be widely shared.

The ability to acquire and store generic information (that is, information about entire categories) is at the core of human cognition. Remarkably, even young children place special value on generic information, often inferring that it holds important insights about the world. Here, we tested whether children's assumptions about the nature of generic information guide their expectations about how widely known this information is.

False-belief understanding in 2.5-year-olds: evidence from two novel verbal spontaneous-response tasks.

Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various non-verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a preferential-looking task in which children listened to a false-belief story while looking at a picture book (with matching and non-matching pictures), and a violation-of-expectation task in which children watched an adult 'Subject' answer (correctly or incorrectly) a standard false-belief question.

2.5-year-olds use cross-situational consistency to learn verbs under referential uncertainty.

Recent evidence shows that children can use cross-situational statistics to learn new object labels under referential ambiguity (e.g., Smith & Yu, 2008).

Attributing false beliefs about non-obvious properties at 18 months.

Reports that infants in the second year of life can attribute false beliefs to others have all used a search paradigm in which an agent with a false belief about an object's location searches for the object. The present research asked whether 18-month-olds would still demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with a novel non-search paradigm. An experimenter shook an object, demonstrating that it rattled, and then asked an agent, "Can you do it?" In response to this prompt, the agent selected one of two test objects.

Syntactic bootstrapping.

Children use syntax to guide verb learning in a process known as syntactic bootstrapping. Recent work explores how syntactic bootstrapping works-how it begins, and how it interacts with progress in syntax acquisition. We review evidence for three claims about the mechanisms and representations underlying syntactic bootstrapping: (1) Learners are biased to represent linguistic knowledge in a usefully abstract mental vocabulary, permitting rapid generalization of newly acquired syntactic knowledge to new verbs.

False-belief understanding in infants.

At what age can children attribute false beliefs to others? Traditionally, investigations into this question have used elicited-response tasks in which children are asked a direct question about an agent's false belief. Results from these tasks indicate that the ability to attribute false beliefs does not emerge until about age 4. However, recent investigations using spontaneous-response tasks suggest that this ability is present much earlier.