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Contingent reciprocity is important in theories of the evolution of human cooperation, but it has been very little studied in ontogeny. We gave 2- and 3-year-old children the opportunity to either help or share with a partner after that partner either had or had not previously helped or shared with the children. Previous helping did not influence children's helping. In contrast, previous sharing by the partner led to greater sharing in 3-year-olds but not in 2-year-olds. These results do not support theories claiming either that reciprocity is fundamental to the origins of children's prosocial behavior or that it is irrelevant. Instead, they support an account in which children's prosocial behavior emerges spontaneously but is later mediated by reciprocity., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Human adults will sometimes help without being asked to help, including in situations in which the helpee is oblivious to the problem and thus provides no communicative or behavioral cues that intervention is necessary. Some theoretical models argue that these acts of 'proactive helping' are an important and possibly human-specific form of prosociality. Two experiments examined whether young children proactively help in a situation where an adult did not provide any concurrent behavioral cues that help was needed. Specifically, in Experiment 1 an experimenter either dropped an object without noticing (experimental condition) or on purpose (control). Even though children were bystanders engaged in their own task, they spontaneously intervened by helping instrumentally in the experimental condition in the absence of concurrent behavioral cues from the actor (significantly more often than in the control condition). These acts increased significantly from 21 to 31months of age, probably reflecting children's emerging social-cognitive capacities to represent goal-directed action. Experiment 2 replicated proactive helping in 2-year-olds in a more closely matched comparison in which in both experimental and control conditions the actor did not notice the accident, and children thus had to infer whether help was needed from the actor's previous responses alone. This result shows that children are able to infer a need for intervention on concurrent situational cues, without behavioral or communicative cues by the helpee. These results indicate that proactive prosociality might be a characteristic of early human ontogeny, emerging in children as young as two years of age., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a series of eight studies in which we systematically assessed the social-cognitive skills of 1- to 3-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings. One group of children was from a Western, middle-class cultural setting in rural Canada and the other two groups were from traditional, small-scale cultural settings in rural Peru and India.In a first group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children's most basic social-cognitive skills for understanding the intentions and attention of others: imitation, helping, gaze following, and communicative pointing.Children's performance in these tasks was mostly similar across cultural settings. In a second group of studies, we assessed 1-year-old children's skills in participating in interactive episodes of collaboration and joint attention.Again in these studies the general finding was one of cross-cultural similarity. In a final pair of studies, we assessed 2- to 3-year-old children's skills within two symbolic systems (pretense and pictorial). Here we found that the Canadian children who had much more experience with such symbols showed skills at an earlier age.Our overall conclusion is that young children in all cultural settings get sufficient amounts of the right kinds of social experience to develop their most basic social-cognitive skills for interacting with others and participating in culture at around the same age. In contrast, children's acquisition of more culturally specific skills for use in practices involving artifacts and symbols is more dependent on specific learning experiences.

Human children 18-24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees were uninterested in the social games. As an experimental manipulation, in each task the adult partner stopped participating at a specific point during the activity. All children produced at least one communicative attempt to reengage him, perhaps suggesting that they were trying to reinstate a shared goal. No chimpanzee ever made any communicative attempt to reengage the partner. These results are interpreted as evidence for a uniquely human form of cooperative activity involving shared intentionality that emerges in the second year of life.