A survey on the challenges, limitations, and opportunities of online testing of infants and young children during the COVID-19 pandemic: using our experiences to improve future practices.

In developmental psychology, the widespread adoption of new methods for testing children does not typically occur over a matter of months. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated social distancing requirements created a sudden need among many research groups to use a new method with which they had little or no experience: online testing. Here, we report results from a survey of 159 researchers detailing their early experiences with online testing.

Examining the influence of shyness on children's helping and comforting behaviour.

Introduction: Shy children, who tend to feel anxious around others and withdraw from social interactions, are found to be less prosocial than their not-shy peers in some studies, though not in others. To examine the contexts in which shy children may be more or less likely to engage in prosocial behaviour, we compared children's willingness and ability to intervene during in-person tasks that differed in and , factors that have been conflated in past research.

Methods: We presented 42, 3.

Following the human point: Research with nonhuman animals since Povinelli, Nelson, and Boysen (1990).

For this special issue in honor of Dr. Sarah (Sally) Boysen's career, we review studies on point following in nonhuman animals. Of the 126 papers that we documented on this topic published since the publication of Povinelli, Nelson, and Boysen (1990, Journal of Comparative Psychology, 104, 203-210), 94 (75%) were published in the past 15 years, including 22 in the past 5 years, indicating that this topic is still an active area of interest in the field of animal behavior and cognition.

Comparative cognition and cognitive ecology in the classroom.

The scientific study of animal cognition has roots in both experimental psychology and evolutionary biology, with researchers often working in related disciplines such as neuroscience, computing science, or ecology. The interdisciplinary nature of the endeavor is both a strength and a challenge for the field. We begin this review with a brief history of comparative cognition and cognitive ecology, focusing on cognitive processes as a mechanistic link between ethology and behaviorism.

Motivating Moral Behavior: Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This exploratory study examined the role of social-cognitive development in the production of moral behavior. Specifically, we explored the propensity of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to engage in helping, sharing, and comforting acts, addressing two specific questions: (1) Compared to their typically developing (TD) peers, how do young children with ASD perform on three prosocial tasks that require the recognition of different kinds of need (instrumental, material, and emotional), and (2) are children with ASD adept at distinguishing situations in which an adult needs assistance from perceptually similar situations in which the need is absent? Children with ASD demonstrated low levels of helping and sharing but provided comfort at levels consistent with their TD peers. Children with ASD also tended to differentiate situations where a need was present from situations in which it was absent.

Intention Attribution and the Development of Moral Evaluation.

Research with infants and toddlers suggests that even early in development, humans evaluate others by considering the outcome of an action in relation to the intention underlying it. When someone tries but fails to do a good deed, for example, it seems that it is "the thought that counts." However, research with slightly older children in the preschool years has produced mixed results: in some cases, children are solely considering the positive or negative outcome of an action when evaluating others, while in others, intention attributions are integrated.

Getting help for others: An examination of indirect helping in young children.

When young children recruit others to help a person in need, media reports often treat it as a remarkable event. Yet it is unclear how commonly children perform this type of pro-social behavior and what forms of social understanding, cognitive abilities, and motivational factors promote or discourage it. In this study, 48 three- to four-year-old children could choose between two actors to retrieve an out-of-reach object for a third person; during this event, one actor was physically unable to provide help.

Conceptual constraints and mechanisms in children's selective learning.

Although we can support Heyes' call for more research on mechanisms, we disagree that the problem has been ignored as Heyes suggests. We also doubt that basic learning mechanisms are alone sufficient to account for the broad range of findings in the selective social learning literature. Although phylogenetically shared learning mechanisms must support selective social learning, we believe that they must also be guided by top-down conceptual considerations that may be special to humans.

Infants' Understanding of Object-Directed Action: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis.

Recognizing that the object-directed actions of others are governed by goals and intentions is a crucial component of human interaction. These actions often occur rapidly and without explanation, yet we learn from and predict the actions of others with remarkable speed and accuracy, even during the first year of life. This review paper will serve as a bridge between several disparate literatures that, we suggest, can each contribute to our understanding of how infants interpret action.

Selectivity in early prosocial behavior.

Prosocial behavior requires expenditure of personal resources for the benefit of others, a fact that creates a "problem" when considering the evolution of prosociality. Models that address this problem have been developed, with emphasis typically placed on reciprocity. One model considers the advantages of being selective in terms of one's allocation of prosocial behavior so as to improve the chance that one will be benefitted in return.

Children's use of communicative intent in the selection of cooperative partners.

Within the animal kingdom, human cooperation represents an outlier. As such, there has been great interest across a number of fields in identifying the factors that support the complex and flexible variety of cooperation that is uniquely human. The ability to identify and preferentially interact with better social partners (partner choice) is proposed to be a major factor in maintaining costly cooperation between individuals.

Classifying prosocial behavior: children's responses to instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire.

This study investigates the diversity of early prosocial behavior by examining the ability of ninety-five 2- to 4-year-olds to provide aid to an adult experimenter displaying instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire. Children provided appropriate aid in response to each of these cues with high consistency over multiple trials. In contrast to the consistency with which the children provided aid within each task, there were no cross-task correlations, and the tendency to respond to each of the cues revealed unique developmental trajectories.

Evidence for partner choice in toddlers: considering the breadth of other-oriented behaviours.

When do humans become moral beings? This commentary draws on developmental psychology theory to expand the understanding of early moral behaviours. We argue that by looking at a broader range of other-oriented acts than what has been considered by Baumard et al., we can find support for the mutualistic approach to morality even in early instances of other-oriented behaviours.

Examining the Diversity of Prosocial Behavior: Helping, Sharing, and Comforting in Infancy.

Prosocial behaviors are a diverse group of actions that are integral to human social life. In this study, we examined the ability of 18- and 24-month-old infants to engage in three types of other-oriented behaviors, specifically helping, sharing, and comforting. Infants in both age groups engaged in more prosocial behavior on trials in which an unfamiliar adult experimenter required aid (experimental conditions) than on those in which she did not (control conditions) across two of the three prosocial tasks (i.

Early understandings of the link between agents and order.

The world around us presents two fundamentally different forms of patterns: those that appear random and those that appear ordered. As adults we appreciate that these two types of patterns tend to arise from very different sorts of causal processes. Typically, we expect that, whereas agents can increase the orderliness of a system, inanimate objects can cause only increased disorder.

Intention-mediated selective helping in infancy.

One way to maintain cooperation between unrelated individuals and decrease the chance of providing costly aid to those who will not reciprocate is by selectively helping on the basis of the content of previous interactions. In the present study, we sought to determine whether the earliest instances of human helping behavior show specificity. In three experiments, we found that infants preferred to help an individual who, in a previous interaction, intended to provide a toy over one who did not (Experiment 1) and that infants consider this positive intention even without a positive outcome (Experiment 2).

Young Infants Detect the Direction of Biological Motion in Point-Light Displays.

In the present study, we examined if young infants can extract information regarding the directionality of biological motion. We report that 6-month-old infants can differentiate leftward and rightward motions from a movie depicting the sagittal view of an upright human point-light walker, walking as if on a treadmill. Inversion of the stimuli resulted in no detection of directionality.

Remembering helpers and hinderers depends on behavioral intentions of the agent and psychopathic characteristics of the observer.

Individual differences in proneness towards granting benefits (i.e., helping) or imposing costs (i.

Continuity in social cognition from infancy to childhood.

Research examining the development of social cognition has largely been divided into two areas: infant perception of intentional agents, and preschoolers' understanding of others' mental states and beliefs (theory of mind). Many researchers have suggested that there is continuity in social cognitive development such that the abilities observed in infancy are related to later preschool ability, yet little empirical evidence exists for this claim. Here, we present preliminary evidence that capacities specific to the social domain contribute to performance in social cognition tasks both during infancy and in early childhood.

Do 5-month-old infants see humans as material objects?

Infants expect objects to be solid and cohesive, and to move on continuous paths through space. In this study, we examine whether infants understand that human beings are material objects, subject to these same principles. We report that 5-month-old infants apply the constraint of continuous motion to inanimate blocks, but not to people.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) recognize spatial and object correspondences between a scale model and its referent.

In the present study, the contributions of spatial and object features to chimpanzees' comprehension of scale models were examined. Seven chimpanzees that previously demonstrated the ability to use a scale model as an information source for the location of a hidden item were tested under conditions manipulating the feature correspondence and spatial-relational correspondence between objects in the model and an outdoor enclosure. In Experiment 1, subjects solved the task under two conditions in which one object cue (color or shape) was unavailable, but positional cues remained.