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First possession is a common heuristic people use to solve property conflicts. Previous studies examined whether young children judged ownership based on the first possession heuristic and its stability when conflicting with other cues such as labor, but few focused on the effects in the discovery context. In this study, we used two discovery stories which indicate the discovered object was not owned by anyone beforehand and investigated ownership reasoning with the first possession heuristic in Chinese 3- to 6-year-old preschoolers. By pitting the first possession cue against the labor cue, we investigated the stability of the first possession heuristic in young children's ownership reasoning. The results showed that in the condition where there was only the first possession cue, both the younger and older groups used the first possession heuristic to reason about ownership. However, in the labor condition, 5- and 6-year-olds ceased to support the first possessor and turned to assign objects to the laborer, whereas 3-year-old children still insisted on the first possession heuristic (Study 1 and Study 2). Children across four age groups did not assign ownership to the person who just played with the object but did not modify it (Study 2). The results demonstrate that Chinese preschoolers understand the role of first possession in ownership assignment at an early age in the discovery context but the elderly preschoolers do not rely on the first possession cue when there are conflicting cues such as labor.

Pictorial stimuli standardized for Chinese children are still absent although it is needed in order to test the development of children's cognitive functions. This study presents normative measures for Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures, viewed by 4- and 6-year old Chinese children. Name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity were obtained for each age group. The data indicate substantial differences between young and older children in name agreement based on expected name, familiarity and visual complexity. The correlation pattern of the variables collected in the present study were consistent with children's norms in other languages and norms of Chinese adults, while there are cross-age and cross-culture differences in specific variables. The obtained measures represent a useful tool for further research on Chinese children's pictorial processing and constitute the first picture normative study for children in this language.

This study aimed to examine how family income and social distance influence young rural Chinese children's altruistic behavior in the dictator game (DG). A total of 469 four-year-old children from eight rural areas in China, including many children left behind by parents who had migrated to urban areas for work, played the DG. Stickers comprised the resource, while recipients in the game were assumed to be either their friends or strangers, with the social distance (i.e., strangers compared to friends) as a between-subjects variable. Children donated significantly more stickers to their friends than to strangers. Moreover, children from lower income families donated more stickers than children from higher income families. However, no gender and parental migrant status differences in children's prosocial behaviors were evident in this sample. Findings of this study suggest that children's altruistic behaviours to peers are influenced by family characteristics since preschool age. The probable influence of local socialization practices on development and the possible adaptive significance were discussed.

Can traces of rapid socio-economic changes within a society be reflected in experimental games? The post-Mao reforms in China provide a unique natural quasi-experiment to study people from the same society who were raised with radically different values about distribution of wealth and altruistic behavior. We tested whether the size of offers in the ultimatum and dictator games are an increasing function of the number of years Chinese citizens experienced of the Mao era ("planned economy"). For the cohort that lived throughout the entire Mao era, we found that mean offers in the two games were substantially higher than what is typically offered in laboratory studies. These offers were also higher than those of two younger Chinese cohorts. In general, the amount offered decreased with less time spent under Mao, while in the oldest group in which every member spent the same amount of time under Mao, the younger members tended to offer more, suggesting an additional effect of early education under Mao and contradicting the alternative hypothesis that generosity increases with age. These results suggest that some of the observed individual differences in the offers made in experimental games can be traced back to the values of the socio-economic era in which individuals grew up.

Glucose transport, mediated by glucose transporters, is necessary for mammary gland development and lactation. GLUT1 and GLUT12 could both be expressed in the pregnant and lactating mammary gland to participate in the glucose uptake process. In this study, the goat GLUT1 and GLUT12 genes were cloned from Saanen dairy goats and transfected into goat mammary gland epithelial cells to assess their biological functions and distributions. The results showed that both goat GLUT1 and GLUT12 had 12 predicted membrane-spanning helices. Goat GLUT1 and GLUT12 each influenced the mRNA expression of the other transporter and increased the glucose consumption and lactose yield in GLUT1- and GLUT12-transfected goat mammary gland epithelial cells, respectively. The overexpression of GLUT1 or GLUT12 also increased the expression of amino acid transporters SLC1A5, SLC3A2 and SLC7A5 and affected genes expressions in GMGE cells. Using immunofluorescence staining, GLUT1 was detected throughout the cytoplasm and localized to the Golgi apparatus around the nuclear membrane, whereas GLUT12 was mainly distributed in the perinuclear region and cytoplasm. This study contributes to the understanding of how GLUT1 and GLUT12 cooperate in the incorporation of nutrient uptake into mammary gland epithelial cells and the promotion of milk synthesis in the goat mammary gland during lactation.