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When solving mathematical problems, young children will perform better when they can use gestures that match mental representations. However, despite their increasing prevalence in educational settings, few studies have explored this effect in touchscreen-based interactions. Thus, we investigated the impact on young children's performance of dragging (where a continuous gesture is performed that is congruent with the change in number) and tapping (involving a discrete gesture that is incongruent) on a touchscreen device when engaged in a continuous number line estimation task. By examining differences in the set size and position of the number line estimation, we were also able to explore the boundary conditions for the superiority effect of congruent gestures. We used a 2 (Gesture Type: drag or tap) × 2 (Set Size: Set 0-10 or Set 0-20) × 2 (Position: left of midpoint or right of midpoint) mixed design. A total of 70 children aged 5 and 6 years (33 girls) were recruited and randomly assigned to either the Drag or Tap group. We found that the congruent gesture (drag) generally facilitated better performance with the touchscreen but with boundary conditions. When completing difficult estimations (right side in the large set size), the Drag group was more accurate, responded to the stimulus faster, and spent more time manipulating than the Tap group. These findings suggest that when children require explicit scaffolding, congruent touchscreen gestures help to release mental resources for strategic adjustments, decrease the difficulty of numerical estimation, and support constructing mental representations., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This study investigated the individual influences of conventionality and designer's intent on function judgments of possibly malfunctioning artifacts. Children aged 4 and 5 years and 6 to 8 years were presented with stories about an artifact with two equally plausible functions, one labeled as either conventional or designed. Subsequently, a character attempted to use the artifact for the cued function, which resulted in either malfunction or successful use. The children's task was to identify the real function of the artifact. When the use attempt succeeded, 4- and 5-year-olds preferred conventional functions to the alternative (but did not show a clear preference between design functions and the alternative), and 6- to 8-year-olds preferred conventional and designed functions to the alternative. In case of malfunction, children's choices were at chance, where the effect of either conventional or design cues was less salient. This contrasts with a baseline condition where children avoided the malfunctioning alternatives. Presenting additional cues about an artifact's function can affect function judgments in cases of malfunction., (Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The "video deficit" is a well-documented effect whereby children learn less well about information delivered via a screen than the same information delivered in person. Research suggests that increasing social contingency may ameliorate this video deficit. The current study instantiated social contingency to screen-based information by embodying the screen within a socially interactive robot presented to urban Australian children with frequent exposure to screen-based communication. We failed to document differences between 22- to 26-month-old children's (N = 80) imitation of screen-based information embedded in a social robot and in-person humans. Furthermore, we did not replicate the video deficit with children imitating at similar levels regardless of the presentation medium. This failure to replicate supports the findings of a recent meta-analysis of video deficit research whereby there appears to be a steady decrease over time in the magnitude of the video deficit effect. We postulate that, should the video deficit effect be truly dwindling in effect size, the video deficit may soon be a historical artifact as children begin perceiving technology as relevant and meaningful in everyday life more and more. This research finds that observational-based learning material can be successfully delivered in person, via a screen, or via a screen embedded in a social robot., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Research has linked economically unequal environments to lower prosocial behavior in adults. However, we know little about how inequality affects children's prosociality. Here, 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 128) played a series of games with several puppets where points were awarded. The distribution of points was characterized by either high inequality or low inequality. Children's donation behavior (i.e., the number of stickers they donated to a poor child), resource division behavior (i.e., how they divided extra points among poor and rich puppets), and fairness perceptions (i.e., how fair they perceived the game to be) were measured in response. Although the experimental manipulation of inequality did not affect children's donations, exploratory analyses revealed that higher inequality in children's home suburb was linked to lower donation rates. Furthermore, with age, children distributed points with increasing concern for poorer individuals, and negative judgments of the inequality were linked to distributing resources to poorer individuals. Here we present the first comprehensive analysis of children's prosocial reactions to high and low inequality across development., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Robots are an increasingly prevalent presence in children's lives. However, little is known about the ways in which children learn from robots and whether they do so in the same way as they learn from humans. To investigate this, we adapted a previously established imitation paradigm centered on inefficient tool use. Children (3- to 6-year-olds; N = 121) were measured on their acquisition and transmission of normative knowledge modeled by a human or a robot. Children were more likely to adopt use of a normative tool and to transmit this knowledge to another when shown how to do so by the human than when shown how to do so by the robot. Older children (5- and 6-year-olds) were less likely than younger children (3- and 4-year-olds) to select the normative tool. Our findings suggest that preschool children are capable of copying and transmitting normative techniques from both human and robot models, albeit at different rates and dependent on age., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Commensurate with constant technological advances, social robots are increasingly anticipated to enter homes and classrooms; however, little is known about the efficacy of social robots as teaching tools. To investigate children's learning from robots, 1- to 3-year-olds observed either a human or a robot demonstrate two goal-directed object manipulation tasks and were then given the opportunity to act on the objects. Children exhibited less imitation from robotic models that varied with task complexity and age, a phenomenon we term the "robot deficit." In addition, the more children engaged with the robot prior to administration of the imitation task, the more likely they were to replicate the robot's actions. These findings document how children are able to learn from robots but that ongoing design of robotic platforms needs to be oriented to developing more socially engaging means of interacting., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Since the proliferation of television sets into households began over half a century ago there has been widespread interest in the impact that viewing has on young children's development. Such interest has grown with the increasing availability of smart phones and tablets. In this review we examine the literature documenting human social learning and how this learning is impacted when the instructing agent appears on a screen instead of face-to-face. We then explore the shifting nature of screen-based media, with a focus on the increasingly socio-normative manner information is portrayed. We discuss how the changing nature of screen technology might be altering how children interpret what they see, and raise the possibility that this may render prevailing evidence as historical documentation, rather than setting out established developmental milestones that transcend the period in which they were documented. We contend that recognizing the significance of historically changing contexts in developmental psychology is timely when the COVID-19 climate is pushing data collection on-line for many labs, often using tasks that were developed primarily for face-to-face contexts., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Past research has indicated that young children have a propensity to adopt the causally unnecessary actions of an adult, a phenomenon known as overimitation. Among competing perspectives, social accounts suggest that overimitation satisfies social motivations, be they affiliative or normative, whereas the "copy-all/refine-later" account proposes that overimitation serves a functional purpose by giving children the greatest opportunity to acquire knowledge with little error. Until recently, these two accounts have been difficult to extricate experimentally, but the development of humanoid robots provides a novel test. Here we document that children overimitate robots, but to a lesser degree than humans and regardless of whether the redundant actions are seen to be ritualistic or functional. These results are best explained with a combined account of overimitation, whereby children approach a learning task with a copy-all/refine-later motivation, but the fidelity of the reproduction of novel behaviors is modulated by the social availability of the demonstrator., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This study examined children's moral concern for robots relative to living and nonliving entities. Children (4-10 years of age, N = 126) watched videos of six different entities having a box placed over them that was subsequently struck by a human hand. Children were subsequently asked to rate the moral worth of each agent relating to physical harm. Children afforded robotic entities less moral concern than living entities but afforded them more moral concern than nonliving entities, and these effects became more pronounced with age. Children's tendency to ascribe mental life to robotic and nonliving entities (but not living entities) predicted moral concern for these entities. However, when asked to make moral judgments relating to giving the agent away, children did not distinguish between nonliving and robotic agents and no age-related changes were identified. Moreover, the tendency to ascribe mental life was predictive of moral concern only for some agents but not others. Overall, the findings suggest that children consider robotic entities to occupy a middle moral ground between living and nonliving entities and that this effect is partly explained by the tendency to ascribe mental life to such agents. They also demonstrate that moral worth is a complex multifaceted concept that does not demonstrate a clear pattern across different ontological categories., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Extensive research has documented that the antisocial behavior of others influences children's perceptions of and behavior toward them. In general, children report liking antisocial agents less, allocate them fewer resources, and are less likely to help them. Despite this, no research to date has explored how antisocial behavior may influence another socially driven behavior-imitation. Moreover, no research has addressed this question cross-culturally. To explore this, children were shown groups behaving prosocially or antisocially and were subsequently given the chance to imitate causally opaque actions (employed to highlight their normative framework) performed by these groups. Children from two cultures in Australia were included in the sample: Brisbane, a medium to large metropolitan city, and Borroloola, a remote indigenous community. Results revealed no impact of prosocial or antisocial behavior on imitative actions in either culture. However, we did identify differences in imitation rates between communities. Specifically, children from Borroloola persisted with imitation at far higher rates than children from Brisbane, highlighting the need for further nuanced research to unpack cross-cultural differences in social learning proclivities., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Extensive research has demonstrated that children show a robust in-group bias and, concurrently, are highly attuned to the prosocial and antisocial behavior of others. The limited research investigating the capacity for antisocial behavior to attenuate children's in-group bias has, however, returned mixed findings. Moreover, no research has examined how this might interact with perceived group permeability. Thus, the current study aimed to provide a more complete understanding of the relationship between in-group bias and antisocial behavior, how this interacts with perceptions of out-group behavior, and how group context (permeability) influences these responses. Children at age 4 and 5years and age 7 and 8years were assigned to a group randomly or based on their performance of a task. They then watched videos of in-groups and out-groups behaving prosocially and antisocially, in differing combinations, with the key experimental conditions focusing on an antisocial in-group paired with either a prosocial or antisocial out-group. In-group preference was then determined using liking ratings, resource allocation, and perceived similarity to the in-group. For older children, but not younger children, antisocial behavior, but not group permeability, was found to attenuate in-group bias for measures of liking and association. Interestingly, no effect was identified for children's own resource allocation behavior. This indicates that although there is a robust effect of antisocial behavior on in-group judgments, it does not extend so far as to influence children to behave antisocially themselves., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Psychology must confront the bias in its broad literature toward the study of participants developing in environments unrepresentative of the vast majority of the world's population. Here, we focus on the implications of addressing this challenge, highlight the need to address overreliance on a narrow participant pool, and emphasize the value and necessity of conducting research with diverse populations. We show that high-impact-factor developmental journals are heavily skewed toward publishing articles with data from WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) populations. Most critically, despite calls for change and supposed widespread awareness of this problem, there is a habitual dependence on convenience sampling and little evidence that the discipline is making any meaningful movement toward drawing from diverse samples. Failure to confront the possibility that culturally specific findings are being misattributed as universal traits has broad implications for the construction of scientifically defensible theories and for the reliable public dissemination of study findings., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Recently the role of soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections in children's cognitive developmental impairment has been under scrutiny. We conducted a systematic review of the evidence for associations between STH infections and cognitive function of children using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol. We aimed to identify the domains of cognitive function in three age strata (<24months, 24-59months and ≥60months) and critically appraise the general design protocol of the studies, with a focus on the cognitive function measurement tools used. A total of 42 papers fulfilled the inclusion criteria, including 10 studies from a recent Cochrane review. Our findings demonstrate variation in tested domains, lack of consistency in the use of measurement tools and analysis of results. Cognitive function measures in children aged under 59months have been mainly limited to domains of gross motor, fine motor and language skills, whereas in children aged 60months and above most studies tested domains such as memory and processing speed. Even within the same age group the results on the association between STH infections and measures of cognitive development were often conflicting. The current study highlights the need for methodological consensus in the use of measurement tools and data analysis protocols if the effect of STH infections on cognitive function domains in children is to be correctly established. This will be an imperative next step to generate conclusive evidence of the role of STH infections in cognitive development in children., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

A capacity for constructing new tools, or using old tools in new ways, to solve novel problems is a core feature of what it means to be human. Yet current evidence suggests that young children are surprisingly poor at innovating tools. However, all studies of tool innovation to date have been conducted with children from comparatively privileged Western backgrounds. This raises questions as to whether or not previously documented tool innovation failure is culturally and economically specific. In the current study, thus, we explored the innovation capacities of children from Westernized urban backgrounds and from remote communities of South African Bushmen. Consistent with past research, we found tool innovation to occur at extremely low rates and that cultural background had no bearing on this. The current study is the first to empirically test tool innovation in children from non-Western backgrounds, with our data being consistent with the view that despite its key role in human evolution, a capacity for innovation in tool making remains remarkably undeveloped during early childhood., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The exhibition of actions that are causally unnecessary to the outcomes with which they are associated is a core feature of human cultural behavior. To enter into the world(s) of their cultural in-group, children must learn to assimilate such unnecessary actions into their own behavioral repertoire. Past research has established the habitual tendency of children to adopt the redundant actions of adults demonstrated directly to them. Here we document how young children will do so even when such actions are modeled to a third person regardless of whether children are presented with the test apparatus by the demonstrating, and assumedly expert, adult or by the observing, and assumedly naive, adult (Experiment 1), whether or not children had opportunity to discover how the apparatus works prior to modeling (Experiment 1), and whether or not children's attention was drawn to the demonstration while they were otherwise occupied (Experiment 2). These results emphasize human children's readiness to acquire behavior that is in keeping with what others do, regardless of the apparent efficiency of the actions employed, and in so doing to participate in cultural learning., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Due to the intensive commercial application of silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs), risk assessment of this nanoparticle is of great importance. Our previous in vitro study demonstrated that Ag NPs caused DNA damage and apoptosis in mouse embryonic stem cells and fibroblasts. However, toxicity of Ag NPs in vivo is largely lacking. This study was undertaken to examine the toxic effects of well-characterized polysaccharide coated 10 nm Ag NPs on heat shock stress, oxidative stress, DNA damage and apoptosis in Drosophila melanogaster. Third instar larvae of D. melanogaster were fed a diet of standard cornmeal media mixed with Ag NPs at the concentrations of 50 and 100 microg/ml for 24 and 48 h. Ag NPs up-regulated the expression of heat shock protein 70 and induced oxidative stress in D. melanogaster. Malondialdehyde level, an end product of lipid peroxidation was significantly higher while antioxidant glutathione content was significantly lower in Ag NPs exposed organisms. Activities of antioxidant enzyme superoxide dismutase and catalase were also significantly higher in the organisms exposed to Ag NPs. Furthermore, Ag NPs up-regulated the cell cycle checkpoint p53 and cell signaling protein p38 that are involved in the DNA damage repair pathway. Moreover, activities of caspase-3 and caspase-9, markers of apoptosis were significantly higher in Ag NPs exposed organisms. The results indicate that Ag NPs in D. melanogaster induce heat shock stress, oxidative stress, DNA damage and apoptosis. This study suggests that the organism is stressed and thus warrants more careful assessment of Ag NPs using in vivo models to determine if chronic exposure presents developmental and reproductive toxicity., (Copyright 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)