Search

Children must learn not to trust everyone to avoid being taken advantage of. In the current study, 5- and 7-year-old children were paired with a partner whose incentives were either congruent (cooperative condition) or conflicting (competitive condition) with theirs. Children of both ages were more likely to mistrust information spontaneously provided by the competitive than the cooperative partner, showing a capacity for detecting contextual effects on incentives. However, a high proportion of children, even at age 7, initially trusted the competitive partner. After being misled once, almost all children mistrusted the partner on a second trial irrespective of the partner’s incentives. These results demonstrate that while even school age children are mostly trusting, they are only beginning to spontaneously consider other’s incentives when interpreting the truthfulness of their utterances. However, after receiving false information only once they immediately switch to an untrusting attitude.

Recent research suggests that young children’s causal justification for minimal group membership can be induced via a cognitive framework of mutual intentionality. That is, an individual can become a group member when both the individual and group agree to membership. Here, we investigated if children ages 3–5 understand groups formed by mutual intentions and whether they apply mutual intentions to realistic groups with varying entitative and essentialized qualities. In two studies (N = 197), we asked 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children if a novel character could join an existing group based on intentionality (mutual, individual-, group-only) and group type (task, friends, family). We find that 4- and 5-year-olds robustly relied on mutual intentions to constitute group membership and 3-year-olds also demonstrated emerging usage of this cognitive framework. Moreover, children employed mutual intentionality across different group types, suggesting a general framework for children’s understanding of different social groups.

Moral judgments can vary depending on the social relationship between agents. We presented 4- and 6-year-old peer dyads (N = 128) with stories, in which a parent (parent condition) or a peer protagonist (peer condition) faced a child in need of help (e.g., the child is thirsty). The dyads had to decide whether the protagonist helped at a cost (e.g., by giving up their water) or not. 6-year-olds expected a parent to help their child more than they expected a child to help their peer. Moreover, children justified their expectations more often with normative statements (e.g., "She has to help") in the parent condition than in the peer condition. Thus, refusal to help a child was more acceptable coming from a peer than from a parent. The results suggest that young children take into account multiple perspectives and form different normative expectations for different social agents when making moral judgments.

This study investigated whether young children accept responsibility for the negative actions of ingroup members. Five-year-old children watched a transgressor break someone else’s valued possession. Depending on condition, this transgressor either belonged to the same group as the child or a different group from the child. Coding of children’s nonverbal behaviour indicated that they displayed more signs of guilt (but not other negative emotions) when the transgressor belonged to their own group than the other group. Furthermore, when the transgressor belonged to their own group, children were more likely to say that their own group should apologise for the damage and that they themselves should try to repair the broken object. Children’s connections to their groups are thus so profound that they appear to feel responsible for the negative actions of their group members even when they had no personal involvement in the harm those actions caused.

Children must sometimes decide between conforming to peer behavior and doing what is right. While research shows that children have a strong inclination to act prosocially and to help conspecifics in need, many studies also demonstrate that children tend to adopt peer behavior. In two studies ( N = 96), we investigated whether children would conform to an antisocial majority or, whether they would do the right thing even under peer pressure. Results show that if a recipient is in need, 5-year-old children act prosocially in two different contexts even when there is a strong selfish incentive not to. However, once the severity of the recipient’s need is reduced, children conform to the antisocial group. The current studies suggest that children’s prosocial motivation sometimes wins out against more selfish drives.

Little is known about the underlying emotional bases of children’s prosociality. Here we engaged 32 dyads of 4-year-old children in a reward-collecting task at the end of which one child was more in need of help. An adult then either helped the needier child (deserving outcome) or the less needy child (less deserving outcome). Both children expressed elevated upper-body posture (positively valenced emotions) when the more needy (but not the less needy) child was helped, whether it was themselves or not. In contrast, both children showed decreased elevation when the less needy (but not the more needy) child received the help, again whether it was themselves or not. These results suggest that preschool children’s prosocial emotions are regulated not only by sympathy for those needing help, but also by a sense of deservingness as determined by social comparison.

Reasoning with a peer to make a joint decision involves making a proposal (e.g., “Polar bears go here”) and justifying it with relevant facts (e.g., “This is ice”) based on common ground assumptions or warrants (e.g., polar bears need ice). Twenty-four dyads of 3- and 5-year-olds built a zoo with toy items that were either conventional (e.g., animals, cages) or unconventional (e.g., piano). For conventional items, both participants in both age groups used justifications that relied on implicit warrants (e.g., stating only the fact “This is ice”, assuming that both partners know that polar bears need ice). For unconventional items, they more often articulated the warrant explicitly, arguably to create the necessary common ground. Five-year-olds made warrants explicit more often, produced more justifications, and reached mutual agreement more often than did 3-year-olds. These results suggest that preschoolers can reason with one another appropriately, specifically in justifying their proposals based on appropriate common ground assumptions.

a b s t r a c t One important component of collaborative problem solving is the ability to plan one's own action in relation to that of a partner. We presented 3- and 5-year-old peer pairs with two different tool choice situations in which they had to choose complementary tools with which to subsequently work on a collaborative problem- solving apparatus. In the bidirectional condition, exemplars of the two necessary tools appeared in front of each child. In the unidirect- ional condition, one child had to choose between two different tools first, while the other child had only one tool available. Thus, both conditions required close attention to the actions of the partner, but the unidirectional condition additionally required the anticipation of the partner's constrained tool choice. Five-year-olds were pro- ficient planners in both conditions, whereas 3-year-olds did not consistently make the correct choice. However, 3-year-olds who had first experienced the unidirectional condition chose the correct tool at an above-chance level. Moreover, communication during the tool choice led to greater success among 3-year-olds, but not among 5-year-olds. These results provide the first experimental evidence that between 3 and 5 years of age children develop the ability to plan the division of labor in a collaborative task. We discuss our findings regarding planning for a collaborative task in relation to prior research on planning abilities for individual problem-solving that appear to undergo developmental change between 3 and 5 years of age.

Children's lives are governed by social norms. Since Piaget, however, it has been assumed that they understand very little about how norms work. Recent studies in which children enforce social norms indicate a richer understanding, but children are still relating to pre-existing adult norms. In this study, triads of 5-year-olds worked on an instrumental task without adult guidance. Children spontaneously created social norms regarding how the game “should” be played. They transmitted these with special force (using more generic and objective language) to novices, suggesting that young children understand to some degree, the conventional nature and special force of social norms in binding all who would participate.

When reasoning with others, the reasons used in an exchange can have varying degrees of quality, irrespective of the facts under discussion. Partners often evaluate one another’s evaluation of reasons – one another’s reasoning. Can children evaluate their partner’s judgment of the quality of reasons independent of objective truth? 5- and 7-year-olds (N=122) chose among two partners for cooperation. In the experimental condition, one acceded to a good reason, the other to a poor reason. In the control condition, each agreed to a different good reason. Crucially, in both conditions, both partners arrived at the wrong conclusion. Results suggested that 7-year-olds, and 5-year-olds to a lesser degree, chose the partner who endorsed the good reason in the experimental condition, but showed no preference for partners in the control condition. Thus, young children distinguish good from poor reasons, even if neither leads to success, and choose partners who do the same.

a b s t r a c t We compared the performance of 3- and 5-year-old children with that of chimpanzees in two tasks requiring collaboration via complementary roles. In both tasks, children and chimpanzees were able to coordinate two complementary roles with peers and solve the problem cooperatively. This is the first experimen- tal demonstration of the coordination of complementary roles in chimpanzees. In the second task, neither species was skillful at waiting for a partner to be positioned appropriately before begin- ning (although children did hesitate significantly longer when the partner was absent). The main difference between species in both tasks was in children's, but not chimpanzees', ability to profit from experience as a collaborator in one role when later reversing roles. This difference suggests that as they participate in a collaboration, young children integrate both roles into a single "birds-eye-view"

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2–0, 2–9 and 3–5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3–5 and at 2–9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although children at 2–9 performed better with familiar than with novel verbs in the act-out task. Children at 2–0 showed no evidence of comprehending word order in either task with novel verbs; with familiar verbs they showed competence in the IPL task but not in the act-out task. The difference in performance for familiar and novel verbs from the same children at 2–0, on the IPL task, and at 2–9, on the act-out task, is consistent with the hypothesis that early linguistic/cognitive representations are graded in strength, with early representations still weak and very task dependent. However, these representations also become more abstract with development, as indicated by the familiarity effect even in the more sensitive IPL task.

In two studies 3-year-olds’ understanding of the context-specificity of normative rules was investigated through games of pretend play. In the first study, children protested against a character who joined a pretend game but treated the target object according to its real function. However, they did not protest when she performed the same action without having first joined the game. In the second study, children protested when the character mixed up an object's pretend identities between two different pretend games. However, they did not protest when she performed the same pretend action in its correct game context. Thus, the studies show that young children see the pretence–reality distinction, and the distinction between different pretence identities, as normative. More generally, the results of these studies demonstrate young children's ability to enforce normative rules in their pretence and to do so context-specifically.

We investigated preschoolers’ selective learning from models that had previously appeared to be reliable or unreliable. Replicating previous research, children from 4 years selectively learned novel words from reliable over unreliable speakers. Extending previous research, children also selectively learned other kinds of acts – novel games – from reliable actors. More important, – and novel to this study, this selective learning was not just based on a preference for one model or one kind of act, but had a normative dimension to it. Children understood the way a reliable actor demonstrated an act not only as the better one, but as the normatively appropriate or correct one, as indicated in both their explicit verbal comments and their spontaneous normative interventions (e.g., protest, critique) in response to third-party acts deviating from the one demonstrated. These findings are discussed in the broader context of the development of children's social cognition and cultural learning.

We investigated whether infants comprehend others’ nonverbal communicative intentions directed to a third person, in an ‘overhearing’ context. An experimenter addressed an assistant and indicated a hidden toy's location by either gazing ostensively or pointing to the location for her. In a matched control condition, the experimenter performed similar behaviors (absent-minded gazing and extended index finger) but did not communicate ostensively with the assistant. Infants could then search for the toy. Eighteen-month-old infants were skillful in using both communicative cues to find the hidden object, whereas 14-month-olds performed above chance only with the pointing cue. Neither age group performed above chance in the control condition. This study thus shows that by 14–18 months of age, infants are beginning to monitor and comprehend some aspects of third party interactions.

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., ‘ The frog is pushing the lion ’, when the lion was actually the ‘agent’ or ‘doer’ of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All children mostly corrected the familiar verb (i.e., they used the agent as the grammatical subject), but there were cross-linguistic differences among the two-year-olds concerning the novel verb. When English 2-year-olds used the novel verb they mostly corrected. However, their most frequent response was to avoid using the novel verb altogether. German 2-year-olds corrected the novel verb significantly more often than their English counterparts, demonstrating more robust verb-general representations of agent- and patient-marking. These findings provide support for a ‘graded representations’ view of development, which proposes that grammatical representations may be simultaneously abstract but ‘weak’.

We present empirical data showing that the relative frequency with which a verb normally appears in a syntactic construction predicts young children's ability to remember and repeat sentences instantiating that construction. Children aged 2;10–5;8 years were asked to repeat grammatical and ungrammatical sentential complement sentences (e.g., ‘ I think + S’). The sentences contained complement-taking verbs (CTVs) used with differing frequencies in children's natural speech. All children repeated sentences containing high frequency CTVs (e.g., think ) more accurately than those containing low frequency CTVs (e.g., hear ), and made more sophisticated corrections to ungrammatical sentences containing high frequency CTVs. The data suggest that, like adults, children are sensitive to lexico-constructional collocations. The implications for language acquisition are discussed.

In many cognitive domains, learning is more effective when exemplars are distributed over a number of sessions than when they are all presented within one session. The present study investigated this distributed learning effect with respect to English-speaking children's acquisition of a complex grammatical construction. Forty-eight children aged 3;6–5;10 (Experiment 1) and 72 children aged 4;0–5;0 (Experiment 2) were given 10 exposures to the construction all in one session (massed), or on a schedule of two trials per day for 5 days (distributed-pairs), or one trial per day for 10 days (distributed). Children in both the distributed-pairs and distributed conditions learnt the construction better than children in the massed condition, as evidenced by productive use of this construction with a verb that had not been presented during training. Methodological and theoretical implications of this finding are discussed, with particular reference to single-process accounts of language acquisition.