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This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values. Keywords: sharing; culture; development; fairness; naive psychology

Performance on identical search tasks based on cues directly perceived or indirectly perceived through video were compared among a group of 4 adult chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), a group of 2 adult orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), and a group of 36 children (between 2 and 3 years of age). Children comprehended directly perceived cues but had difficulty with video cues. In contrast, chimpanzees and 1 orangutan were successful in using video to guide their search for a hidden object. Two follow-up studies with 3-year-old children demonstrated the importance of more distinct perceptual and verbal cues in aiding children's understanding of video as referring to real-world events.

Thirty-six 2-, 4-, and 6-month-old infants were videotaped while interacting with a female adult stranger engaging in either organized or disorganized 1-min peekaboo games. Two-month-old infants gazed and smiled equally at the stranger, regardless of the relative organization of the peekaboo game. In contrast, 4- and 6-month-old infants smiled significantly more and gazed significantly less in the organized peekaboo condition than in the disorganized peekaboo condition. These results suggest that from a diffuse sensitivity to the presence of a social partner, infants by 4 months develop a new sensitivity to the narrative envelope of protoconversation, in particular the timing and the structure of social exchanges scaffolded by adults. These observations are interpreted as evidence of developing social expectations in the first 6 months of life. This early development is viewed as announcing and preparing the communicative competence that blossoms by the end of the 1st year.

Key Words: Action * Development * Infancy * Plasticity * Transitions, Ulrich Muller and Willis F. Overton's study on the development of representational thought in infants manages to demonstrate the feasibility of Piaget's action-theoretical perspective on cognitive development. However, the study fails to provide evidences proving that the development of practical intelligence is linked with the emergence of representational abilities in less than a year old infants. This implies that the relation between action, visual perception and cognition in early ontogeny needs further empirical exploration.

The perceptual strategies used by 4 orangutans (2 subadults, 2 adults) when choosing the larger of 2 volumes in a Piagetian conservation task were investigated. Three possible perceptual strategies were investigated: (a) direct perceptual estimation of the container's content independent of its shape, (b) use of the spatial and temporal cues provided by the pouring of liquid from one container to another, and (c) ability to initially identify the larger volume and track it across transformations disregarding misleading perceptual cues. Results indicated that the direct perceptual estimation strategy was the best candidate to explain the orangutan's systematic choice of the larger of 2 quantities.

An account of the postural determinants of perceived reachability is proposed to explain systematic overestimations of the distance at which an object is perceived to be reachable. In this account, these errors are due to a mapping of the limits of prehensile space onto a person's perceived region of maximum stretchability, in the context of a whole-body engagement. In support of this account, 6 experiments on the judged reachability of both static and dynamic objects are reported. We tentatively conclude that the mental imagery of action is grounded and calibrated in reference to multiple skeletal degrees of behavioral freedom. Accordingly, this calibration is a source of systematic error in reachability judgments.

Four orangutans (1 juvenile, 2 subadults, and 1 adult) and ten 6-8-year-old children were tested in 4 liquid conservation tasks of increasing levels of difficulty. Task difficulty depended on the type of transformation (continuous vs. discontinuous quantities) and the relative contrast between the shapes of the containers. Results indicate that orangutans did not display conservation in the strict sense; instead they showed 'partial' conservation (intermediate reactions according to J. Piaget & B. Inhelder, 1941). In contrast, some of the children provided evidence of conservation in all 4 tasks, showing 'true' or logically necessary conservation in the original sense proposed by J. Piaget and B. Inhelder (1941). Although orangutans did not show conservation in the strict sense, as J. Piaget (1955) and others have generally agreed it should be defined, orangutans behaved as individual and creative problem solvers, adopting different perceptual strategies depending on the task.

Sixty 3- and 4-5-month-old infants were simultaneously presented with 2 on-line video images of their own legs. In 3 experiments, the temporal contingency between the 2 images and the infant's actual movements was maintained constant while their spatial relationships were systematically manipulated. In Experiment 1, both spatial orientation and directionality of movement on the visual display were varied. In Experiment 2, only directionality of movement was varied. In Experiment 3, only spatial orientation was varied. Analyses focused on infants' preferential looking and relative amount of leg activity while looking at either view. Results show that both groups of infants actively compared and explored the 2 views of their legs. They looked significantly longer and generated significantly more leg activity while looking at the view displaying a left-right inversion. These results demonstrate that the perception of self-produced leg movements by young infants is partially determined by spatial information about movement directionality. The results are interpreted as evidence of an early detection of intermodal invariants which specify the body as a situated agent in the environment.

Assessment of the ability of three-, four-, five-year-olds and adults to perceive reachability of objects validated the hypothesis that spatial decentration and perspective taking are task specific and occur early in life. Children resemble adults in their display of allocentrism in their judgments about reachability pertaining to perceptual tasks.

Six-month-old infants were presented with sounding objects under 3 conditions of illumination: in full vision, in the dark with target location specified by a glowing and sounding object, and in the dark with location specified by sound alone. Reaching behavior was videotaped with an infrared camera, and hand movement was measured by infrared-emitting diodes on the hand that were tracked by a motion analysis system. No differences were found in reaching behavior for objects in the light and glowing objects in the dark. Reaches for sounding objects in the dark had higher speeds, shorter durations, and more errors compared to the other 2 conditions. These findings indicate that vision of the hand did not appear to affect infants' reaching in this situation, whereas vision of the target did.

Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by children's ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. Knowing whether this age of transition is common across diverse cultures is important to understanding what causes this development. Cross-cultural studies have produced mixed findings, possibly because of varying methods used in different cultures. The present study used a single procedure to measure false-belief understanding in five cultures: Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand. With a standardized procedure, we found synchrony in the onset of mentalistic reasoning, with children crossing the false-belief milestone at approximately 5 years of age in every culture studied. The meaning of this synchrony for the origins of mental-state understanding is discussed.

Catchy acronyms such as 'WEIRD population' are good mnemonics. However, they carry the danger of distracting us from deeper issues: how to sample populations, the validity of measuring instruments, the levels of processing involved. These need to be considered when assessing claims of universality regarding how the mind works 'in general'--a dominant and highly rewarded drive in the behavioral and brain sciences. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X10000233

The engineer's look at how the mind works omits a central piece of the puzzle. It ignores the dynamic of motivations and the social context in which mindreading and metacognition evolved and developed in the first place. Mindreading and metacognition derive from a primacy of affective mindreading and meta-affectivity (e.g., secondary, emotions such as shame or pride), both co-emerging in early development.

Social animals need to share space and resources, whether sexual partners, parents, or food. Humans, however, are unique in the way they share as they evolved to become Homo negotiatus; a species that is prone to bargain and to dispute the value of things until some agreement is reached. This evolution had far-reaching consequences on the specific makeup of human psychology--a psychology that has for trademark a compulsive preoccupation with the self in relation to others. I propose that the understanding and sharing of intentions are probably the consequences of such evolution, and not its origins.

The comparative study of empathy should be based on the developmental taxonomy of vicarious experiences offered by the abundant literature on infants and children's cognitive, social, and emotional development. Comparative research on the topic should refer to the various kinds of empathy emerging in an orderly fashion early in human development.

Hand-mouth coordination is a behavioral pattern observed in infants that combines two distinct motor systems. This action is one of the earliest behavior patterns to be observed in an infant, and some studies estimate that it occurs in the womb as early as 18 weeks menstrual age (from date of mother's last menstrual flow). Two separate experiments were performed that focused on the hand-mouth coordination of 31 healthy infants who were one to three days old; In the first experiment a solution of 12 percent sucrose was given to the infants every two minutes. The sucrose induced sustained hand-in-mouth contact, and the sucrose also had a calming affect on the infants which persisted beyond the period of sucrose administration. However, the hand-in-mouth behavior stopped when sucrose was ceased. In the second experiment, nine infants were given either water or a sucrose solution. The third experiment involved eight infants who were given a pacifier after the sucrose. In general, the results of all three studies indicated that sucrose is a very effective calming agent in one- to three-day-old infants. The coordinated system which integrates hand-mouth activity was also well documented. The hand-in-mouth behavior observed was a result of motivational development in these infants. Also, the sensorimotor pattern was substantiated by these studies. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)

Observations indicate that, contrary to commonly held views, very young infants are actors who explore their environment, rather than passive recipients of stimulation. Newborns can track objects with their eyes and heads, reach out toward objects that are moving close to them, and align their heads in the direction of sound. Exploration appears as a basic guiding motive from birth. This early behavior involves action systems which have specific adaptive functions, such as exploration, locomotion, and communication. Perceptual and motor aspects of behavior overlap to form these early action development patterns. More than one perceptual system is operative and therefore this action system may be termed 'multimodal'. The results of three different studies that have focused on object manipulation and exploration by infants two to five months old are reported. The first study concentrated on free exploration in infants; the second compared infants by age in their exploration and manipulation of an object, with or without light; the third examined multimodal exploration when two different objects were presented. The results of all three experiments indicate that between two and five months significant changes occur in infants' exploration behavior as object exploration becomes more multimodal. Coordination of the hands is initially associated with putting things into the mouth, but then, as the use of the fingers develops, this coordination is reorganized to incorporate visual information by about four months of age. During the first six months, the primary characteristics of exploration and object manipulation develop. (Consumer Summary produced by Reliance Medical Information, Inc.)