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Some humans, like other animals, may sense magnetic fields: Gurindji people from Australia can locate a hidden magnet solely based on magnetoreception, but an American control group cannot (Meakins, 2022). Why can only some humans use magnetoreception? One possibility is that human magnetoreception is experience-dependent: the fundamental capability may be universal, but the Gurindji learn to use it reliably because, unlike Americans, their language and culture promotes paying constant attention to cardinal directions and thinking about space using a geocentric cognitive map, which sensing the Earth's magnetic field would help with. If so, we might expect other cultures using geocentric thinking, such as the Hai//om people from Namibia, to have also learned to use magnetoreception. We tested this and found that, unlike Gurindji, Hai//om people could not locate a hidden magnet at above chance levels, suggesting that learning to think geocentrically may not be sufficient to acquire magnetoreception.

Adults have rich beliefs about children's development timelines, and they interpret and react to children's behaviors across ages, holding children responsible to some degree. While children's mental capacity and potential could motivate moral agency attribution, a question remains whether a consistent relation exists between the empirical beliefs about children's various capacities and the responsibility attribution to their behaviors that manifest the corresponding capacities. Here, we tested 361 adults (UK, US) on their folk psychology and moral beliefs about different ages with vignettes that reflect agential control in various domains (motor control, inhibitory control, theory of mind, planning, moral evaluation) combined with several variants of scenarios. We characterized the relation between adults' expectations and responsibility attribution with mixed models. We found that this moral reasoning varies for targets of different ages and the amount of responsibility is mostly determined by age. We suggest an alternative mechanism between capacity- and moral beliefs.

The relational matching-to-sample task (RMTS) is a gold standard in measuring abstract concepts. Most preschoolers and non-human animals do not spontaneously succeed in the classic, two-item version of the task. It is debated whether this failure indicates a lack of abstract reasoning ability, perhaps linked to limited language capabilities, or rather stems from learned biases for other bases of matching. We developed a physical, causal RMTS task for 4- to 5-year-old children based on matching the weight relations within object pairs by asking them to align two balance scale apparatuses. We presented conflicting object matches in half of the trials and a transfer phase with a new set of stimuli. By age five, children benefitted from the causal context of the task, suggesting that not solely abstract reasoning abilities but other factors, like biases to match individual object features, influence their performance in classic arbitrary RMTS tasks.

Researchers commonly use puppets in development science. Amongst other things, puppets are employed to reduce social hierarchies between child participants and adult experimenters akin to peer interactions. However, it remains controversial whether children treat puppets like real-world social partners in these settings. This study investigated children's imitation of causally irrelevant actions (i.e., over-imitation) performed by puppet, adult, or child models. Seventy-two German children (Age[subscript Range] = 4.6-6.5 years; 36 girls) from urban, socioeconomically diverse backgrounds observed a model retrieving stickers from reward containers. The model performed causally irrelevant actions either in contact with the reward container or not. Children were more likely to over-imitate adults' and peers' actions as compared to puppets' actions. Across models, they copied contact actions more than no-contact actions. While children imitate causally irrelevant actions from puppet models to some extent, their social learning from puppets does not necessarily match their social learning from real-world social agents, such as children or adults.

Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (Age[subscript Range] = 3.5-4.5 years; N = 144; 76[male gender symbol]) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less mind properties to puppets than peers or adults. However, children's social cognition (i.e., normativity, prosociality, and theory of mind) varied little across partners. Puppetry relies on children's ability for pretense, but can provide valid insights into socio-cognitive development. Implications for using puppets as stand-ins for peers in developmental research are discussed.

Primate cognition research allows us to reconstruct the evolution of human cognition. However, temporal and contextual factors that induce variation in cognitive studies with great apes are poorly understood. Here we report on a longitudinal study where we repeatedly tested a comparatively large sample of great apes (N = 40) with the same set of cognitive measures. We investigated the stability of group-level results, the reliability of individual differences, and the relation between cognitive performance and individual-level characteristics. We found results to be relatively stable on a group level. Some, but not all, tasks showed acceptable levels of reliability. Cognitive performance across tasks was not systematically related to any particular individual-level predictor. This study highlights the importance of methodological considerations – especially when studying individual differences – on the route to building a more robust science of primate cognitive evolution.

Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative motivations underlying conformity, as well as intracultural variability in their age patterns. We measured conformity in both a public and a private setting among 5- to 11-year-olds from eight different communities in Vanuatu (n = 125, 59 boys), a highly diverse society in the South Pacific. We also explored whether selected sociodemographic variables help to explain individual variation in children's conformity. Conformity is lower in both public and private settings the older ni-Vanuatu children are, with conformity in public settings being subject to more developmental and intracultural variation. We infer that normative conformity is more variable than informational conformity. Moreover, we find that children in higher school classes conform less. Our study combines a developmental perspective with an intracultural comparison, and demonstrates that both the publicness of the experimental situation and intracultural variability are important for the understanding of the age patterns of conformity.

Following eye gaze is fundamental for many social‐cognitive abilities, for example, when judging what another agent can or cannot know. While the emergence of gaze following has been thoroughly studied on a group level, we know little about (a) the developmental trajectory beyond infancy and (b) the sources of individual differences. In Study 1, we examined gaze following across the lifespan (N = 478 3‐ to 19‐year‐olds from Leipzig, Germany; and N = 240 20‐ to 80‐year‐old international, remotely tested adults). We found a steep performance improvement during preschool years, in which children became more precise in locating the attentional focus of an agent. Precision levels then stayed comparably stable throughout adulthood with a minor decline toward old age. In Study 2, we formalized the process of gaze following in a computational cognitive model that allowed us to conceptualize individual differences in a psychologically meaningful way (N = 60 3‐ to 5‐year‐olds, 50 adults). According to our model, participants estimate pupil angles with varying levels of precision based on observing the pupil location within the agent's eyes. In Study 3, we empirically tested how gaze following relates to vector following in non‐social settings and perspective‐taking abilities (N = 102 4‐ to 5‐year‐olds). We found that gaze following is associated with both of these abilities but less so with other Theory of Mind tasks. This work illustrates how the combination of reliable measurement instruments and formal theoretical models allows us to explore the in(ter)dependence of core social‐cognitive processes in greater detail. Research Highlights: Gaze following develops beyond infancy. The highest precision levels in localizing attentional foci are reached in young adulthood with a slight decrease towards old age.We present a computational model that describes gaze following as a process of estimating pupil angles and the corresponding gaze vectors.The model explains individual differences and recovers signature patterns in the data. To estimate the relation between gaze‐ and vector following, we designed a non‐social vector following task.We found substantial correlations between gaze following and vector following, as well as Level 2 perspective‐taking. Other Theory of Mind tasks did not correlate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social motivation is theorized to promote Theory of Mind development in childhood, but research testing this link is scarce and largely limited to urban middle‐class milieus of the Global North. Here, we investigated the link between social motivation (i.e., social reward responsivity) and Theory of Mind (i.e., false belief understanding) among N = 59 Hai||om children (AgeRange = 2.3–8.0 years) from rural Namibia, an indigenous community where children's social experience with peers and adults differs much from urban middle‐class milieus typically sampled in developmental science research. Children's preference for adult, but not peer faces predicted their false belief performance. Moreover, their false belief performance increased with age, showing mastery of the current false belief task by the preschool years. These results accommodate universalist claims on the link between social motivation and Theory of Mind while suggesting a particular contribution of the social reward responsivity to adult social partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined preschoolers' social inclusion--the active involvement of new partners into social interactions--in different intergroup contexts. Using an interactive paradigm, 3- to 5-year-old German children played a ball-tossing game with 2 puppets in which 1 puppet initiated the game with the child and another approached the game. In Study 1 (N = 144), the initiator was from an ingroup while an outgroup puppet approached the game (ingroup/outgroup condition) or the child and the 2 puppets did not have any group membership (control condition). Social inclusion was assessed by analyzing whether and how children included the approaching puppet into the game. Results revealed that children were more inclusive with increasing age. Across age, children were less willing to include the approaching puppet in the intergroup context as compared to the control context. To further investigate whether the difference between conditions was driven by a preference for the ingroup or a derogation of the outgroup, a second study (N = 72) was conducted. Here, the initiating puppet was neutral (i.e., no group membership) and the approaching puppet was from an outgroup (neutral/outgroup condition). In this condition, social inclusion was in between the 2 conditions of Study 1. Further, the developmental trajectory found in Study 1 could be replicated in Study 2 such that children were more likely to include the approaching puppet with increasing age. These results suggest that children's willingness to include others increases over preschool age and is influenced by both ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation.

From a young age, children in Western, industrialized societies overimitate others' actions. However, the underlying motivation and cultural specificity of this behavior have remained unclear. Here, 3- to 8-year-old children (N = 125) from two rural Namibian populations (Haillom and Ovambo) and one urban German population were tested in two versions of an overimitation paradigm. Across cultures, children selectively imitated more actions when the adult model was present compared to being absent, denoting a social motivation underlying overimitation. At the same time, children's imitation was not linked to their tendency to reengage the adult in a second, independent measure of social motivation. These results suggest that, across diverse cultures, children's imitative behavior is actuated by the attentive state of the model.

Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children participated in a resource task with a peer-partner, where we established ownership by assigning children to one side or the other of an apparatus and by marking resources with colors to help children keep track of them. When retrieving resources in the partner's presence, the majority of children took their own things and respected what belonged to their partner. A proportion of children in all societies also respected ownership in their partner's absence, although the strength of respect varied considerably across societies. We discuss implications for the development of ownership concepts and possible explanations for societal differences.