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A growing body of literature has established longitudinal associations between key social cognitive capacities emerging in infancy and children's subsequent theory of mind. However, existing work is limited by modest sample sizes, narrow infant measures, and theory of mind assessments with restricted variability and generalizability. The current study aimed to extend this literature by (a) recruiting a large sample of participants (n = 116; 53 boys; 63 girls; all U.S. residents; 88 White, 8 Hispanic or Latino, 2 Black or African American, 14 two or more races/ethnicities, 4 unknown; median family income: $74-122,000), (b) examining multiple measures of infant social cognition (intentional action understanding, responding to joint attention, initiating joint attention) at Time 1 (8-12 months), and (c) using an ecologically valid theory of mind assessment designed to capture individual differences in preschoolers' mental state understanding (the Children's Social Understanding Scale) at Time 2 (37-45 months). Measured variable path analysis revealed a significant longitudinal association between infants' initiating joint attention and later theory of mind: infants who engaged in more attempts to initiate joint attention with experimenters through gaze alternation or gestures went on to show better parent-reported mental state understanding as preschoolers. Notably, the paths from infants' responding to joint attention and intentional action understanding to later theory of mind did not emerge as significant. These findings bolster and clarify existing claims about how mental state reasoning is rooted in foundational social-cognitive capacities emerging in infancy.

Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental‐state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus fail behavioral false‐belief tasks and the extent to which there is continuity versus change in the ToM neural network. To address these questions, we analyzed event‐related spectral power in the electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate how preschoolers' neural activity during passive viewing of false‐belief scenarios related to their explicit behavioral ToM performance. We found that neural activity during passive viewing of false‐belief events (6–9 Hz EEG 'alpha' suppression in right temporoparietal [RTP] electrodes) strongly related to children's explicit ToM. However, children's RTP alpha suppression differed depending on their explicit behavioral ToM performance: Children who did better on a broad battery of standard ToM tasks and who passed explicit behavioral false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression when the character's belief first became false (during the 'location‐change' event); whereas children who did worse on the ToM battery and who failed explicit behavioral false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression only later when they could evaluate the character's behavior in the context of prior events (during the 'active‐search' event). Findings shed light on what differentiates preschoolers who pass versus fail explicit false‐belief tasks and raise questions about how to interpret existing neuroscience data from ToM tasks across infancy to adulthood. Research Highlights: Preschool children's neural activity (EEG 6–9 Hz suppression in right temporoparietal [RTP] electrodes) during passive‐viewing of false‐belief events was related to their explicit behavioral theory‐of‐mind performance.Children who did better on a theory‐of‐mind (ToM) battery and passed explicit false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression when the character's belief first became false.Children who performed worse on the ToM battery and failed explicit false‐belief tasks showed greater RTP alpha suppression later when observing the character's search behavior.Findings reveal change in preschoolers' ToM neural correlates and suggest that the presence of RTP activity does not necessarily indicate 'mature' theory of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In everyday life, we use folk theories about the mind and behavior to understand ourselves and others. An important part of our folk theory of mind is our intuitions about the role of the self in mental functioning--namely, whether the self is able to control each mental operation. The current study explored beliefs about the nature of control over emotional aspects of mental experience from middle childhood through adulthood. Elementary school children (n = 46), middle schoolers (n = 46), 18-year-olds (n = 46), and adults (n = 104) were presented with vignettes depicting characters experiencing negative emotions. Participants evaluated the intentionality, changeability, and chronicity of the characters' responses. Results showed that by elementary school, children share adults' view that emotions are largely outside of volitional control. However, beliefs about the changeability and chronicity of emotions mature beyond middle childhood. Between elementary school and adulthood, participants decreased their endorsement of the ability to change one's current negative emotions and increased their beliefs in the chronic, enduring nature of these responses. With age, these changeability and chronicity beliefs also came to differ depending on the emotional response (i.e., feeling grumpy, being nervous, acting mean). Together, these findings suggest that intuitions about the controllability of emotional experience become more differentiated and less optimistic across development.

As they learn to navigate the social world, children construct frameworks to interpret others' behavior. The present studies examined two such frameworks: a mentalistic framework, which construes behavior as driven by internal mental states; and a normative framework, which presumes people act in accordance with social norms. Participants included 101 children (ages 4, 7, and 10; 81% White; 41% female) and 35 adults (66% female) tested in the northeastern United States from 2019 to 2021. Children and adults utilized both mentalistic and normative frameworks to explain others' behaviors. Framework use depended on features of the behavior being explained. Minimal developmental differences were observed. The relative independence and the utility of the mentalistic and normative frameworks for naïve reasoning about behavior are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generic statements express generalizations about categories and present a unique semantic profile that is distinct from quantified statements. This paper reports two studies examining the development of children's intuitions about the semantics of generics and how they differ from statements quantified by "all," "most," and "some." Results reveal that, like adults, preschoolers (a) recognize that generics have flexible truth conditions and are capable of representing a wide range of prevalence levels; and (b) interpret novel generics as having near-universal prevalence implications. Results further show that by age 4, children are beginning to differentiate the meaning of generics and quantified statements; however, even 7- to 11-year-olds are not adultlike in their intuitions about the meaning of "most"-quantified statements. Overall, these studies suggest that by preschool, children interpret generics in much the same way that adults do; however, mastery of the semantics of quantified statements follows a more protracted course.

During the first year of life, infants possess some of the key social--cognitive abilities required for success in a social world: Infants interpret others' actions in terms of their intentions and can use this understanding prospectively to generate predictions about others' behavior. Exactly how these foundational abilities develop is currently unknown. The goal of this study was to shed light on the developmental mechanisms underlying changes in infants' understanding of intentional actions by documenting relations between infants' intention understanding and other emerging social (joint attention) and motor (means-end and self-locomotion) abilities. Using eye tracking, 8- to 11-month-olds infants' (N = 80) ability to visually predict the goal of an ongoing successful or failed intentional action was examined in relation to their developing means--end, self-locomotion, and joint attention abilities. Results confirmed previous findings showing improvements in infants' ability to interpret and make predictions about others' failed intentional actions. Importantly, results also indicated that parent-report measures of infants' initiating-joint-attention and self-locomotion abilities were associated with the ability to visually predict the outcome of a failed reaching action. These data support the view that infants' social and motor experiences may contribute to changes in their social--cognitive abilities. In particular, joint-attentive social interactions that occur with increasing frequency as infants learn to crawl and walk may shape infants' understanding of others as intentional agents.

The goal of the present study was to explore domain differences in young children's expectations about the structure of animal and artifact categories. We examined 5-year-olds' and adults' use of category-referring generic noun phrases (e.g., "Birds fly") about novel animals and artifacts. The same stimuli served as both animals and artifacts; thus, stimuli were perceptually identical across domains, and domain was indicated exclusively by language. Results revealed systematic domain differences: children and adults produced more generic utterances when items were described as animals than artifacts. Because the stimuli were novel and lacking perceptual cues to domain, these findings must be attributed to higher-order expectations about animal and artifact categories. Overall, results indicate that by age 5, children are able to make knowledge-based domain distinctions between animals and artifacts that may be rooted in beliefs about the coherence and homogeneity of categories within these domains. (Contains 2 figures.)

Generic statements (e.g., "Lions have manes") make claims about kinds (e.g., lions as a category) and, for adults, are distinct from quantificational statements (e.g., "Most lions have manes"), which make claims about how many individuals have a given property. This article examined whether young children also understand that generics do not depend purely on quantitative information. Five-year-olds (n = 36) evaluated pairs of questions expressing properties that were matched in prevalence but varied in whether adults accept them as generically true (e.g., "Do lions have manes?" [true] vs. "Are lions boys?" [false]). Results demonstrated that children evaluate generics based on more than just quantitative information. Data suggest that even young children recognize that generics make claims about kinds.

Under what circumstances do people agree that a kind-referring generic sentence (e.g., "Swans are beautiful") is true? We hypothesised that theory-based considerations are sufficient, independently of prevalence/frequency information, to lead to acceptance of a generic statement. To provide evidence for this general point, we focused on demonstrating the impact of a specific theory-based, essentialist expectation--that the physical features characteristic of a biological kind emerge as a natural product of development--on participants' reasoning about generics. Across three studies, adult participants (N=99) confirmed our hypothesis, preferring to map generic sentences (e.g., "Dontrets have long tails") onto novel categories for which the key feature (e.g., long tails) was absent in all the young but present in all the adults rather than onto novel categories for which the key feature was at least as prevalent but present in some of the young and in some of the adults. Control conditions using "some"- and "most"-quantified sentences demonstrated that this mapping is specific to generic meaning. These results suggest that generic meaning does not reduce to quantification and is sensitive to theory-based expectations. (Contains 1 footnote and 5 figures.)

Children and adults commonly produce more generic noun phrases (e.g., birds fly) about animals than artifacts. This may reflect differences in participants' generic knowledge about specific animals/artifacts (e.g., dogs/chairs), or it may reflect a more general distinction. To test this, the current experiments asked adults and preschoolers to generate properties about novel animals and artifacts (Experiment 1: real animals/artifacts; Experiments 2 and 3: matched pairs of maximally similar, novel animals/artifacts). Data demonstrate that even without prior knowledge about these items, the likelihood of producing a generic is significantly greater for animals than artifacts. These results leave open the question of whether this pattern is the product of experience and learned associations or instead a set of early-developing theories about animals and artifacts. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

This paper explores how children use two possible solutions to the verb-mapping problem: attention to perceptually salient actions and attention to social and linguistic information (speaker cues). Twenty-two-month-olds attached a verb to one of two actions when perceptual cues (presence/absence of a result) coincided with speaker cues but not when these cues were placed into conflict (Experiment 1), and not when both possible referent actions were perceptually salient (Experiment 2). By 34 months, children were able to override perceptual cues to learn the name of an action that was not perceptually salient (Experiment 3). Results demonstrate an early reliance on perceptual information for verb mapping and an emerging tendency to weight speaker information more heavily over developmental time.

Generic statements (e.g., 'Birds lay eggs') express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as 'Lorches have purple feathers' as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics' meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. Keywords: Generic language; Concepts; Truth conditions; Prevalence implications; Quantifiers; Semantics DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01126.x

Joint book reading provides an ecological context for examining processes involved in the emergence of cultural differences in noun and verb use. Tardif, Gelman, & Xu (1999) found that English- and Mandarin-speaking mothers differed in their relative use of nouns and verbs during joint book reading with their 20-month-olds: Mandarin-speaking mothers produced more main verbs and fewer common nouns than did English-speaking mothers. We sought to clarify the source and specificity of these differences by reexamining these transcripts. Results indicated that cross-linguistic differences in noun and verb use do not arise from cross-cultural variation in behavioral control alone; differences persisted in picture-related conversations. Moreover, in both cultures, mothers' focus on objects and actions shifted in response to the nature of the pictures being discussed. Results are considered in terms of the relationship between culture-specific patterns of book reading, scene perception, and language acquisition. Keywords: nouns; verbs; language acquisition, joint book reading,' culture

A growing body of work has documented the emergence of instrumental helping and sharing in the second year of life; however, less is known about mechanisms that underlie development and production of prosocial behavior. The current study took a longitudinal approach to explore whether the origins of prosocial behaviors can be traced back to foundational social‐cognitive capacities emerging in infancy. In a sample of 90 children, longitudinal relations were examined between intention understanding and joint attention measured in infancy (8–12 months) and later instrumental helping and sharing behavior assessed in the toddler years (18–25 months). We expected social‐cognitive capacities supporting infants' understanding of others to be positively related to their prosocial behaviors as toddlers. Measured variable path analyses revealed two distinct developmental pathways from infant social cognition to later prosocial behavior: 1) Instrumental helping in the toddler years was positively predicted by intention understanding in infancy; 2) sharing in the toddler years was positively predicted by infants' initiating joint attention. These results lend support to proposals on the multidimensional nature of early prosocial behavior and offer the first longitudinal evidence that the origins of toddlers' prosocial behavior can be traced to social‐cognitive capacities emerging in infancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infants' understanding of the intentional nature of human action develops gradually across the first year of life. A key question is what mechanisms drive changes in this foundational social‐cognitive ability. The current studies explored the hypothesis that triadic interactions in which infants coordinate attention between a social partner and an object of mutual interest promote infants' developing understanding of others as intentional agents. Infants' spontaneous tendency to participate in triadic engagement was assessed in a semi‐structured play session with a researcher. Intentional action understanding was assessed by evaluating infants' ability to visually predict the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 1 (N = 88) revealed that 8‐ to 9‐month‐olds who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement showed better concurrent reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 2 (N = 114) confirmed these findings using a longitudinal design and demonstrated that infants who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement at 6–7 months were better at prospectively reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action 3 months later. Cross‐lagged path analyses revealed that intentional action understanding at 6–7 months did not predict later triadic engagement, suggesting that early triadic engagement supports later intentional action processing and not the other way around. Finally, evidence from both studies revealed the unique contribution of triadic over dyadic forms of engagement. These results highlight the importance of social interaction as a developmental mechanism and suggest that infants enrich their understanding of intentionality through triadic interactions with social partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to interpret and predict the actions of others is crucial to social interaction and to social, cognitive, and linguistic development. The current study provided a strong test of this predictive ability by assessing (1) whether infants are capable of prospectively processing actions that fail to achieve their intended outcome, and (2) how infants respond to events in which their initial predictions are not confirmed. Using eye tracking, 8-month-olds, 10-month-olds, and adults watched an actor repeatedly reach over a barrier to either successfully or unsuccessfully retrieve a ball. Ten-month-olds and adults produced anticipatory looks to the ball, even when the action was unsuccessful and the actor never achieved his goal. Moreover, they revised their initial predictions in response to accumulating evidence of the actor's failure. Eight-month-olds showed anticipatory looking only after seeing the actor successfully grasp and retrieve the ball. Results support a flexible, prospective social information processing ability that emerges during the first year of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]