“Everything Happens for a Reason”: Children's Beliefs About Purpose in Life Events

Do children believe that “everything happens for a reason?” That is, do children endorse purpose‐based, teleological explanations for significant life events, as they do for social behavior, artifacts, biological properties, and natural kinds? Across three experiments, 5‐ to 7‐year‐olds (N = 80), 8‐ to 10‐year‐olds (N = 72), and adults (N = 91) chose between teleological and nonteleological accounts of significant life events and judged how helpful those accounts were for understanding an event's cause. Five‐ to 7‐year‐olds favored teleological explanations, but this preference diminished with age. Five‐ to 7‐year‐olds and 8‐ to 10‐year‐olds also found teleological explanations more helpful than did adults. Perceiving purpose in life events may therefore have roots in childhood, potentially reflecting a more general sensitivity to purpose in the social and natural worlds.     

If You're Happy and You Know It: Positive Moods Reduce Age‐Related Differences in False Memory

When tested in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm, children typically exhibit fewer false memories than do adolescents or adults. Here, participants’ moods and the valence of word lists were manipulated to explore the mechanism responsible for this developmental reversal in memory performance. Children (7‐ to 8‐year‐olds), adolescents (11‐ to 12‐year‐olds), and young adults (18‐ to 22‐year‐olds; N = 270) were assigned to one of three induced mood conditions and were presented with emotional word lists. In negative moods, adolescents and adults falsely recalled more negative information than did children, showing the typical developmental reversal effect. This effect, however, was eliminated when participants were in positive moods. The findings provide support for associative‐activation theory and have important implications for our understanding of the development of emotional false memories.     

The Development of Selective Copying: Children's Learning From an Expert Versus Their Mother

This study tested the prediction that, with age, children should rely less on familiarity and more on expertise in their selective social learning. Experiment 1 (N = 50) found that 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds copied the technique their mother used to extract a prize from a novel puzzle box, in preference to both a stranger and an established expert. This bias occurred despite children acknowledging the expert model's superior capability. Experiment 2 (N = 50) demonstrated a shift in 7‐ to 8‐year‐olds toward copying the expert. Children aged 9–10 years did not copy according to a model bias. The findings of a follow‐up study (N = 30) confirmed that, instead, they prioritized their own—partially flawed—causal understanding of the puzzle box.     

Preferences for Explanation Generality Develop Early in Biology But Not Physics

One of the core functions of explanation is to support prediction and generalization. However, some explanations license a broader range of predictions than others. For instance, an explanation about biology could be presented as applying to a specific case (e.g., “this bear”) or more generally across “all animals.” The current study investigated how 5‐ to 7‐year‐olds (N = 36), 11‐ to 13‐year‐olds (N = 34), and adults (N = 79) evaluate explanations at varying levels of generality in biology and physics. Findings revealed that even the youngest children preferred general explanations in biology. However, only older children and adults preferred explanation generality in physics. Findings are discussed in light of differences in our intuitions about biological and physical principles.     

Order Matters: Children's Evaluation of Underinformative Teachers Depends on Context

The ability to evaluate “sins of omission”—true but pragmatically misleading, underinformative pedagogy—is critical for learning. This study reveals a developmental change in children's evaluation of underinformative teachers and investigates the nature of their limitations. Participants rated a fully informative teacher and an underinformative teacher in two different orders. Six‐ and 7‐year‐olds (N = 28) successfully distinguished the teachers regardless of the order (Experiment 1), whereas 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds (N = 82) succeeded only when the fully informative teacher came first (Experiments 2 and 3). After seeing both teachers, 4‐year‐olds (N = 32) successfully preferred the fully informative teacher (Experiment 4). These results are discussed in light of developmental work in pragmatic implicature, suggesting that young children might struggle with spontaneously generating relevant alternatives for evaluating underinformative pedagogy.     

The Role of Stimulus Novelty on Children's Inflexible Dimensional Switching

Children's ability to flexibly shift attention between different representational schemes was investigated using the dimensional change card sorting task. Across three experiments (N = 56 three‐year‐olds and N = 40 four‐year‐olds in 2 ; N = 14 three‐year‐olds in 3 ; and N = 14 three‐year‐olds in 4 ) the role of perceptual information on children's cognitive flexibility was investigated by manipulating different aspects of the task materials between pre‐ and postswitch phases. Better performance was observed when either task‐relevant (the color or shape of the images on the cards) or task‐irrelevant information (the background color or shape of the actual cards) was changed, with this improvement occurring when the changes were salient enough to induce a stimulus novelty effect.     

Carving Metacognition at Its Joints: Protracted Development of Component Processes

Two experiments investigated the development of metacognitive monitoring and control, and conditions under which children engage these processes. In Experiment 1, 5‐year‐olds (N = 30) and 7‐year‐olds (N = 30), unlike adults (N = 30), showed little evidence of either monitoring or control. In Experiment 2, 5‐year‐olds (N = 90) were given performance feedback (aimed at improving monitoring), instruction to follow a particular strategy (aimed at improving control), or both. Across conditions, feedback improved children's monitoring, and instruction improved both monitoring and control. Thus, children's poor metacognitive performance likely reflects a difficulty engaging the component processes spontaneously rather than a lack of metacognitive ability. These findings also suggest that the component processes are distinct, with both undergoing protracted development.     

Children's Norm Enforcement in Their Interactions With Peers

This study investigates how children negotiate social norms with peers. In Study 1, 48 pairs of 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds (N = 96) and in Study 2, 48 pairs of 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds (N = 96) were presented with sorting tasks with conflicting instructions (one child by color, the other by shape) or identical instructions. Three‐year‐olds differed from older children: They were less selective for the contexts in which they enforced norms, and they (as well as the older children to a lesser extent) used grammatical constructions objectifying the norms (“It works like this” rather than “You must do it like this”). These results suggested that children's understanding of social norms becomes more flexible during the preschool years.     

Accent,Language, and Race: 4–6‐Year‐Old Children's Inferences Differ by Speaker Cue

Three experiments examined 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds' use of potential cues to geographic background. In Experiment 1 (N = 72), 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds used a speaker's foreign accent to infer that they currently live far away, but 6‐year‐olds did not. In Experiment 2 (N = 72), children at all ages used accent to infer where a speaker was born. In both experiments, race played some role in children's geographic inferences. Finally, in Experiment 3 (N = 48), 6‐year‐olds used language to infer both where a speaker was born and where they currently live. These findings reveal critical differences across development in the ways that speaker characteristics are used as inferential cues to a speaker's geographic location and history.     

Children's concepts of gears and their promotion through play

The mechanical transmission of motion, which is observable in gears’ turning direction (TD) and turning speed (TS) can be understood as part of the core concept “force and motion”. Previous studies have suggested that most children before the age of nine have naïve concepts of gears’ TD and TS. However, these studies relied on children's explanation data and might have therefore underestimated young children's potential. Moreover, these studies did not examine whether preschoolers can overcome their naïve concepts through teaching. Recently, educators have proposed guided play as an educational approach that combines children's play with teacher guidance in a purposefully designed environment. We conducted two subsequent studies. In Study 1, we investigated the children's (naïve) concepts of gears’ TD and TS with a cross‐sectional approach using a nonverbal test procedure. This study comprised 248 children aged 5–10 years and 73 adults. The results showed that the proportion of children with adequate concepts increased with age. More specifically, 7‐ to 8‐year‐olds differed significantly from 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds, indicating a developmental shift around this age. However, naïve concepts of TS were more persistent with age than naïve concepts of TD. Altogether, the results indicated the potential to foster 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds’ concepts of both TD and TS in an intervention. Thus, in Study 2, we developed and tested a guided play intervention to foster 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children's concepts of TD and TS. We conducted a prepost‐intervention design with a guided play group (n = 19) and a free play group (n = 21). The results suggested stronger learning gains in the guided play group (d_TD = 0.337, d_TS = 0.758) than in the free play group (d_TD = 0.224, d_TS = 0.158).     

Who's the Boss? Concepts of Social Power Across Development

Power differences are observed in children's early relationships, yet little is known about how children conceptualize social power. Study 1 recruited adults (n = 35) to assess the validity of a series of vignettes to measure five dimensions of social power. Using these vignettes, Study 2 (149 three‐ to nine‐year‐olds, 42 adults) and Study 3 (86 three‐ to nine‐year‐olds, 22 adults) showed that children visiting a science museum at a middle class university town are sensitive to several dimensions of social power from a young age; however, an adult‐like breadth of power concepts does not develop until 7–9 years. Children understand social power whether the powerful character is malevolent or benevolent, though malevolent power is easier to detect for children and adults.     

The Audiovisual Temporal Binding Window Narrows in Early Childhood

Binding is key in multisensory perception. This study investigated the audio‐visual (A‐V) temporal binding window in 4‐, 5‐, and 6‐year‐old children (total N = 120). Children watched a person uttering a syllable whose auditory and visual components were either temporally synchronized or desynchronized by 366, 500, or 666 ms. They were asked whether the voice and face went together (Experiment 1) or whether the desynchronized videos differed from the synchronized one (Experiment 2). Four‐year‐olds detected the 666‐ms asynchrony, 5‐year‐olds detected the 666‐ and 500‐ms asynchrony, and 6‐year‐olds detected all asynchronies. These results show that the A‐V temporal binding window narrows slowly during early childhood and that it is still wider at 6 years of age than in older children and adults.     

Introspection Plays an Early Role in Children's Explicit Theory of Mind Development

This study assessed children's (N = 236) ability to introspect the mental states of seeing and knowing relative to their ability to attribute each state to others. Children could introspect seeing 10 months before they could introspect knowing. Two‐ and 3‐year‐olds correctly reported their own seeing states, whereas 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds correctly reported their own knowing states. For each mental state, there was a 7‐month difference before children could correctly attribute that state to another. These findings indicate that knowing is more difficult to introspect than seeing and that the ability to introspect each mental state emerges prior to the ability to correctly attribute them to others. Theoretical implications for self–other differences in theory‐of‐mind development are considered.     

The “Batman Effect”: Improving Perseverance in Young Children

This study investigated the benefits of self‐distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four‐ and 6‐year‐old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six‐year‐olds persevered longer than 4‐year‐olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third‐person perspective on the self, or finally, a first‐person perspective. Alternative explanations, implications, and future research directions are discussed.     

Unpacking the Ontogeny of Gesture Understanding: How Movement Becomes Meaningful Across Development

Gestures, hand movements that accompany speech, affect children's learning, memory, and thinking (e.g., Goldin‐Meadow, 2003). However, it remains unknown how children distinguish gestures from other kinds of actions. In this study, 4‐ to 9‐year‐olds (n = 339) and adults (n = 50) described one of three scenes: (a) an actor moving objects, (b) an actor moving her hands in the presence of objects (but not touching them), or (c) an actor moving her hands in the absence of objects. Participants across all ages were equally able to identify actions on objects as goal directed, but the ability to identify empty‐handed movements as representational actions (i.e., as gestures) increased with age and was influenced by the presence of objects, especially in older children.     

Infants Rely More on Gaze Cues From Own‐Race Than Other‐Race Adults for Learning Under Uncertainty

Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own‐ over other‐race faces, but whether this experience has downstream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7‐month‐olds (range = 5.9–8.5 months; N = 96) use gaze from own‐ versus other‐race adults to anticipate events. When gaze predicted an event's occurrence with 100% reliability, 7‐month‐olds followed both adults equally; with 25% (chance) reliability, neither was followed. However, with 50% (uncertain) reliability, infants followed own‐ over other‐race gaze. Differential face race experience may thus affect how infants use social cues from own‐ versus other‐race adults for learning. Such findings suggest that infants integrate online statistical reliability information with prior knowledge of own versus other race to guide social interaction and learning.     

Preschoolers Use Emotion in Speech to Learn New Words

Two experiments examined 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds' use of vocal affect to learn new words. In Experiment 1 (n = 48), children were presented with two unfamiliar objects, first in their original state and then in an altered state (broken or enhanced). An instruction produced with negative, neutral, or positive affect, directed children to find the referent of a novel word. During the novel noun, eye gaze measures indicated that both 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds were more likely to consider an object congruent with vocal affect cues. In Experiment 2, 5‐year‐olds (n = 15) were asked to extend and generalize their initial mapping to new exemplars. Here, 5‐year‐olds generalized these newly mapped labels but only when presented with negative vocal affect.     

Realizing Relevance: The Influence of Domain‐Specific Information on Generation of New Knowledge Through Integration in 4‐ to 8‐Year‐Old Children

In accumulating knowledge, direct modes of learning are complemented by productive processes, including self‐generation based on integration of separate episodes. Effects of the number of potentially relevant episodes on integration were examined in 4‐ to 8‐year‐olds (N = 121; racially/ethnically heterogeneous sample, English speakers, from large metropolitan area). Information was presented along with unrelated or related episodes; the latter challenged children to identify the relevant subset of episodes for integration. In Experiment 1, 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds integrated in the unrelated context. Six‐year‐olds also succeeded in the related context in forced‐choice testing. In Experiment 2, 8‐year‐olds succeeded in open‐ended and forced‐choice testing. Results illustrate a developmental progression in productive extension of knowledge due in part to age‐related increases in identification of relevant information.     

Developmental Changes in Executive Functioning

Although early studies of executive functioning in children supported Miyake et al.'s (2000) three‐factor model, more recent findings supported a variety of undifferentiated or two‐factor structures. Using a cohort‐sequential design, this study examined whether there were age‐related differences in the structure of executive functioning among 6‐ to 15‐year‐olds (N = 688). Children were tested annually on tasks designed to measure updating and working memory, inhibition, and switch efficiency. There was substantial task‐based variation in developmental patterns on the various tasks. Confirmatory factor analyses and tests for longitudinal factorial invariance showed that data from the 5‐ to 13‐year‐olds conformed to a two‐factor structure. For the 15‐year‐olds, a well‐separated three‐factor structure was found.     

Late Emergence of the First Possession Heuristic: Evidence From a Small‐Scale Culture

Western preschool children often assign ownership based on first possession and some theorists have proposed that this judgment might be an early emerging, innate bias. Five‐ to 9‐year‐olds (n = 112) from a small‐scale group in Kenya (Kikuyu) watched videotaped interactions of two women passing an object. The object's starting position and the women's gestures were varied. Use of the first possession heuristic increased with age, and 8‐ to 9‐year‐olds performed similarly to German 5‐year‐olds (n = 24). Starting position and gestures had no effect. A control study confirmed that 5‐year‐old Kikuyus (n = 20) understood the video material. The findings reveal that the first possession heuristic follows different developmental trajectories cross‐culturally and stress the role of children's sociocultural environment.