Three- and 5-year-old children's understanding of how to dissolve a joint commitment.

When young children form a joint commitment with a partner, they understand that this agreement generates obligations. In this study, we investigated whether young children understand that joint commitments, and their associated obligations, may likewise be dissolved by agreement. The participants (3- and 5-year-olds; N = 144) formed a joint commitment with a puppet to play a collaborative game.

3- and 5-year-old children's adherence to explicit and implicit joint commitments.

The problem with collaboration is that there are temptations to defect. Explicit joint commitments are designed to mitigate some of the risks, but people also feel committed to others implicitly when they both know together that they each hold the other's fate in their hands. In the current study, pairs of 3-year-old and 5-year-old children ( = 192) played a collaborative game.

Three-Year-Olds' Reactions to a Partner's Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment.

When children make a joint commitment to collaborate, obligations are created. Pairs of 3-year-old children (N = 144) made a joint commitment to play a game. In three different conditions the game was interrupted in the middle either because: (a) the partner child intentionally defected, (b) the partner child was ignorant about how to play, or (c) the apparatus broke.

Holistic face processing of own- and other-age faces in young and older adults: ERP evidence from the composite face task.

Participants more accurately remember own-age relative to other-age faces (own-age bias, OAB). The present study tested whether this effect is related to more efficient holistic processing of own-age faces. Young adult and older participants performed a composite face task with young and old faces, in which they indicated whether the upper half of two subsequent composite faces was identical or not.