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Teaching is the primary way children learn about the world. However, successful learning involves recognizing when teaching is ineffective, even in the absence of overt cues, and divesting from ineffective teaching to explore novel solutions. Across three experiments, we investigated 7- to 10-year-old children's ability to recognize ineffective teaching; we tested the hypothesis that girls may be less likely than boys to divest by exploring new solutions, given documented gender differences in socialization toward conformity and obedience. Overall, we demonstrate that children independently tested taught solutions and, upon learning that the solutions were ineffective, rationally traded off between instruction and exploration. Simultaneously, gender differences in divestment emerged. On average, girls demonstrated greater persistence in applying the taught solution, while boys tended to explore their own ideas, leading to differences in solving and learning. Importantly, these differences were observable across both masculine- and feminine-stereotyped tasks. These results have important implications for children's learning and the development of leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Biases favoring the wealthy are ubiquitous, and they support and bolster vast resource inequalities across individuals and groups; yet, when these biases are acquired remains unknown. In Experiments 1 through 5 (Total N = 232), using multiple methods, we found that 14- to 18-month-old infants track individuals' wealth (Experiments 1-5), prefer and selectively help rich (vs. poor) individuals (Experiments 2 and 3), and negatively evaluate poor individuals (Experiments 4 and 5). In two subsequent experiments with 11- to 13-month-old infants (Total N = 65), however, we find no evidence of preferences for rich (vs. poor) individuals (Experiment 6) or differential evaluations of rich and poor people (Experiment 7). Together, these results demonstrate that in the second year of life, wealth emerges as a central and robust dimension of evaluation that guides social decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Although the presence of early helping behavior has been firmly established, it is unclear to what extent children are willing to adopt costs to help others, as well as how this willingness changes as children get older. Canadian 21- to 36-month-olds (N = 48) participated in four helping tasks varying in the type and degree of effort required to help (lifting force, cognitive load, the number of steps in a task, and pushing force). When costs were lower, toddlers were not only more likely to help but also provided help more readily and helped in ways that prioritized others' needs. Importantly, we found that age and how costly helping was to individual children each uniquely predicted high-cost helping, but not low-cost helping. Overall, we demonstrate that toddlers' helping is sensitive to a variety of effortful costs, while simultaneously demonstrating that maturation and individual costs appear to uniquely influence high-cost helping., (© 2024 The Author(s). Developmental Science published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Identifying the origins of moral sensitivities, and their elaboration, within infancy and early childhood is a challenging task, given inherent limitations in infants' behavior. Here, I argue for a multi-pronged, multi-method approach that involves cleaving the moral response at its joints. Specifically, I chart the emergence of infants' moral expectations, evaluations, generalization and enforcement, demonstrating that while many moral sensitivities are present in the second year of life, these sensitivities are closely aligned with, and likely driven by, infants' everyday experience. Moreover, qualitative differences exist between the moral responses that are present in infancy and those of later childhood, particularly in terms of enforcement (i.e., a lack of punishment in infancy). These findings set the stage for addressing outstanding critical questions regarding moral development, that include identifying discrete causal inputs to early moral cognition, identifying whether moral cognition is distinct from social cognition early in life, and explaining gaps that exist between moral cognition and moral behavior in development., (Copyright © 2024. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Adults use an individual's behavior in one moral subdomain to make inferences about how they will act in another moral subdomain, reflecting a tendency to attribute underlying traits to individuals. We recruited 4- to 7-year-old children from a large city in North America to investigate their ability to generalize from one moral subdomain to another and integrate these pieces of information to form trust and friendship decisions, focusing on the subdomains of helping and fairness, given their centrality to moral cognition. In Experiment 1 ( N = 131; 49% female; 38% White), children watched a protagonist help or hinder another person with their goal and then engage in either a fair or an unfair resource distribution between two novel recipients; in Experiment 2 ( N = 130; 52% female; 55% White), these events were reversed. We recorded the children's surprise at the second event and their willingness to trust subsequent information provided by the protagonist and to befriend her. Children selectively generalized from the initial behavior, reporting greater surprise to fair (vs. unfair) behavior after the protagonist hindered and greater surprise to the protagonist helping (vs. hindering) after she distributed resources unfairly previously. Moreover, the presence of a single moral transgression lowered children's trust and friendship judgments to chance levels. These findings demonstrate that moral transgressions (vs. moral adherence to moral norms) provide a basis for guiding children's subsequent expectations for future behavior across moral subdomains, as well as for forming social decisions regarding whether to befriend and trust individuals, for children as young as age 4 years. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Process praise (i.e., praise for effort) facilitates childhood persistence. However, less is known about the mechanism by which process praise influences persistence in infancy. Here, we propose that well-timed process praise reinforces the link between effort and success, thus promoting persistence in young children. In Experiment 1, U.S. infants aged 17-18 months old ( N = 29; 13 females; M age = 18 months, 3 days; 76% White) and in Experiment 2, Canadian toddlers aged 17-31 months old ( N = 60; 34 females; M age = 22 months, 17 days; 40% White) participated with caregivers. Across experiments, caregiver process and general praise overlapping temporally with both trying and success related to greater persistence during a dyadic task, while praise offered only during trying or success was not. However, the effects of temporally aligned process praise were more robust than the effects of general praise. Furthermore, process praise which did not correspond to children's actions (i.e., high-volume or randomly dispersed process praise) negatively related to persistence. Thus, these findings demonstrate that young children are responsive to temporal alignment in praise and further suggest that temporal alignment especially in process praise may help form the basis for later mindset models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Evaluations of others' generosity are critical for selecting quality social partners, yet the factors which systematically affect these evaluations and whether they vary across development are still relatively unclear. Here, we establish that two key dimensions adults and children (aged 4 to 7 years) consider are the cost associated with a giving action and the need of the recipient, through six pre-registered experiments with Canadian and U.S. American participants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults' and children's third-party evaluations of generosity are sensitive to variations in each factor, across several operationalizations of cost and need in both comparative and standalone contexts, suggesting cost and need can be spontaneously evoked. However, children's responses were more consistent for need scenarios than cost scenarios. In Experiments 3 and 4, we modified our scenarios to evaluate whether variations in cost and need are considered simultaneously in both generosity evaluations and affiliative preferences. Adults' and older children's (ages 6 to 7) evaluations of generosity and affiliative preferences were sensitive to both factors, but younger children did not utilize this information systematically. Importantly, in Experiments 5 and 6, adults' and older children's generosity evaluations were only sensitive to information about cost and need when the giver's actions conferred utility to a recipient, but not when actions were self-serving. Taken together, we establish robust evidence that cost and need are considered in generosity evaluations by demonstrating that Canadian and U.S. American adults and children utilize this information consistently, spontaneously, and simultaneously., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Across two experiments, we investigated whether infants use prior behavior to form expectations about future behavior within the moral domain, focusing on the sub-domains of fairness and help/harm. In Experiment 1, 14- to 27-month-old infants were familiarized to an agent who either helped or hindered another agent to obtain her goal. At test, infants saw the helper or hinderer perform either a fair or unfair distribution of resources to two recipients. Infants familiarized to helping looked longer to the unfair distribution than the fair distribution at test, whereas infants familiarized to hindering looked equally at both test events, suggesting that hindering led infants to suspend baseline expectations of fairness. In Experiment 2, infants saw these events in reverse. Following familiarization to fair behavior, infants looked equally to helping and hindering; in contrast, following familiarization to unfair behavior, infants looked significantly longer to helping than hindering on test, suggesting that prior unfair behavior led infants to expect the agent to hinder another agent's goals. These results suggest that infants utilize prior information from one moral sub-domain to form expectations of how an individual will behave in another sub-domain, and that this tendency seems to manifest more strongly when infants initially see hindering and unfair distributions than when they see helping and fair distributions. Together, these findings provide evidence for consilience within the moral domain, starting by at least the second year of life., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Gill and Sommerville.)

By early childhood, children possess clear expectations about how resources should be, and typically are, distributed, expecting and advocating for equal resource distributions to recipients. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that children may be able to use deviations from equality in resource distributions to make inferences about the nature of social relationships. Here, we investigated whether children use partiality in resource distributions displayed by adults toward children in third-party contexts to identify parent-child relationships, whether children anticipate preferential treatment based upon knowledge of third-party parent-child relationships, and whether children anticipate different emotional reactions to impartiality in resource distributions in parent-child interactions compared to neighbor-child interactions. Four-to seven-year-old children were presented with hypothetical vignettes about an adult character who distributed resources to two children either equally, or systematically favoring one child. By the age of 4, children used resource distribution partiality to identify an adult as a child's parent, and also used these expectations to guide their anticipated emotional reactions to impartiality. By the age of 6, children were also more likely to anticipate partiality to be displayed in parent-child compared to neighbor-child relationships. The findings from the current study reveal that partiality in resource distributions acts as a valuable cue to aid in identifying and understanding social relationships, highlighting the integral role that resources play in children's understanding of their social world. More broadly, our findings support the claim that children use cues that signal interpersonal investment to specify and evaluate parent-child relationships in third-party contexts., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 McPhee, Bagh, Schmuckler and Sommerville.)

When confronted with novel problems, problem-solvers must decide whether to copy a modeled solution or to explore their own unique solutions. While past work has established that infants can learn to solve problems both through their own exploration and through imitation, little work has explored the factors that influence which of these approaches infants select to solve a given problem. Moreover, past work has treated imitation and exploration as qualitatively distinct, although these two possibilities may exist along a continuum. Here, we apply a program novel to developmental psychology (DeepLabCut) to archival data (Lucca et al., 2020) to investigate the influence of the effort and success of an adult's modeled solution, and infants' firsthand experience with failure, on infants' imitative versus exploratory problem-solving approaches. Our results reveal that tendencies toward exploration are relatively immune to the information from the adult model, but that exploration generally increased in response to firsthand experience with failure. In addition, we found that increases in maximum force and decreases in trying time were associated with greater exploration, and that exploration subsequently predicted problem-solving success on a new iteration of the task. Thus, our results demonstrate that infants increase exploration in response to failure and that exploration may operate in a larger motivational framework with force, trying time, and expectations of task success., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Solby, Radovanovic and Sommerville.)

Cooperative societies rely on reward and punishment for norm enforcement. We examined the developmental origin of these interventions in the context of distributive fairness: past research has shown that infants expect resources to be distributed fairly, prefer to interact with fair distributors, and evaluate others based on their fair and unfair resource allocations. In order to determine whether infants would intervene in third-party resource distributions by use of reward and punishment we developed a novel task. Sixteen-month-old infants were taught that one side of a touch screen produces reward (vocal statements expressing praise; giving a cookie), whereas the other side produces punishment when touched (vocal statements expressing admonishment; taking away a cookie). After watching videos in which one actor distributed resources fairly and another actor distributed resources unfairly, participants' screen touches on the reward and punishment panels while the fair and unfair distributors appeared on screen were recorded. Infants touched the reward side significantly more than the punishment side when presented with the fair distributor but touched the screen sides equally when the unfair distributor was shown. Control experiments revealed no evidence of reward or punishment when infants saw food items they liked and disliked, or individuals uninvolved in the resource distribution events. These results provide the earliest evidence that infants are able to spontaneously intervene in socio-moral situations by rewarding positive actions., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Recent evidence suggests that infants engage in selective prosocial behavior toward some individuals over others; the ways in which infants are selective can illuminate the origins of prosocial behaviors. Here, we explored selective helping behavior, investigating whether a target recipient's prior adherence to, or defiance of, social conventions affects infants' subsequent likelihood of helping the target individual. 19-month-old infants (N = 120) participated in an interaction with an experimenter who correctly labeled common objects, incorrectly labeled objects, or labeled objects with nonsense English-like labels. Infants' rates of helping were higher when the experimenter adhered to labeling conventions than when she defied labeling conventions by either labeling objects incorrectly or using unfamiliar nonsense labels. The current study provides evidence that infants use information about adhering to conventions to guide their helping behavior. These findings help to document the ways in which infants are selective in their helping behavior as well as possible origins of prosocial obligations toward ingroup members., (Published by Elsevier Inc.)

The ability to decide whether, when and how to try is central to human learning. We investigated whether infants can make rational inferences about when and how to try on a novel problem-solving task. After learning from an adult that the task was either easy, difficult or impossible to solve, infants varied in whether, when and how they tried based on the type of social evidence that they received and on their own ongoing experience with the task. Specifically, infants formed expectations about the task, their own ability to solve the task and the experimenter's ability to solve the task, in light of accumulating evidence across time that impacted their time spent trying, trying force, affect, and help-seeking behaviour on the task. Thus, infants flexibly integrate social input and first-hand experience in a dynamic fashion to engage in adaptive persistence.

Infants' persistence in the face of challenges predicts their learning across domains. In older children, linguistic input is an important predictor of persistence: when children are praised for their efforts, as opposed to fixed traits, they try harder on future endeavors. Yet, little is known about the impact of linguistic input as individual differences in persistence are first emerging, during infancy. Based on a preliminary investigation of the CHILDES database, which revealed that language surrounding persistence is an early-emerging feature of children's language environment, we conducted an observational study to test how linguistic input in the form of praise and persistence-focused language more broadly impacts infants' persistence. In Study 1, 18-month-olds and their caregivers participated in two tasks: a free-play task (a gear stacker) and a joint-book reading task. We measured parental language and infants' persistent gear stacking. Findings revealed that infants whose parents spent more time praising their efforts and hard work (process praise), and used more persistence-focused language in general, were more persistent than infants whose parents used this language less often. Study 2 extended these findings by examining whether the effects of parental language on persistence carry over to contexts in which parents are uninvolved. The findings revealed that parental use of process praise predicted infants' persistence even in the absence of parental support. Critically, these findings could not be explained by caregivers' reporting on their own persistence. Together, these findings suggest that as early as 18 months, linguistic input is a key predictor of persistence., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding of partial inequality has been well documented across middle childhood and is attributed to a host of potential theoretical underpinnings, including developing number concept, increased regard for one's social status, and a maturing concept of fairness. The current study examined the electrophysiological markers associated with children's (N = 83; 4 to 8 years of age) third-party evaluations of equal, slightly unequal, and extremely unequal resource distributions, documenting the timing of fairness considerations. It further explored the link between individual differences in these neural computations and children's allocation behaviors and judgments. Event-related potentials demonstrated an early differentiation between equality and any type of inequality reflected by a medial frontal negativity. Later (after 500 ms), extreme inequality was discriminated from equality and slight inequality. Differences in later waveforms predicted sharing and third-party contextual resource distributions, accounting for wealth and merit. These results illuminate the multifaceted nature of developing neural computations of fairness and illustrate the value of a multiple levels of analysis approach in contributing theoretical clarity toward the developmental science of moral cognition and behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Persistence is central to outcomes across a range of domains: the harder you try, the further you get. Yet relatively little is known about the developmental origins of persistence. Here, we highlight key reasons for a surge of interest in persistence in infancy and early childhood., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In this article, I use infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness as a test case to identify the extents and limits of infants' sociomoral cognition and behavior. Infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness is in some ways commensurate with this understanding in older children and adults; infants expect fair distributions of resources and evaluate others based on their adherence to or violation of fairness norms. Yet these sensitivities also differ in important ways, including that infants do not spontaneously punish unfair individuals. I address questions about the role of experience in infants' development of sociomoral cognition and behavior, and whether infants' moral cognition and behavior are differentiated appropriately (from their social knowledge and behavior) and integrated (across subaspects of morality). I suggest two approaches to move the field forward: investigating processes that contribute to developing sociomoral cognition and behavior, and considering infants' successes and failures in this domain.

Cost-benefit analyses are central to mature decision-making and behavior across a range of contexts. Given debates regarding the nature of infants' prosociality, we investigated whether 18-month-old infants' (N = 160) prosocial behavior is impacted by anticipated costs and benefits. Infants participated in a helping task in which they could carry either a heavy or light block across a room to help an experimenter. Infants' helping behavior was attenuated when the anticipated physical costs were high versus low (Experiment 1), and high-cost helping was enhanced under conditions of increased intrinsic motivational benefits (Experiments 2 and 3). High-cost helping was further predicted by infants' months of walking experience, presumably because carrying a heavy block across a room is more effortful for less experienced walkers than for more experienced walkers demonstrating that infants subjectively calibrate costs. Thus, infants' prosocial responding may be guided by a rational decision-making process that weighs and integrates costs and benefits., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object. We demonstrate that on average, 12.5-month-old American infants view taking actions as a better indication of an agent's future behavior than are receiving actions. Furthermore, there were significant individual differences in the extent to which infants perceived object receipt to be indicative of future behavior. Specifically, the less autonomous infants were perceived to be (by their parents), socialized to be, and behaved, the more they viewed object receipt as indicative of future behavior. The results are discussed in terms of the role of individual and cultural experience in early understanding of intentional action. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).)

Concerns about fairness are central to mature moral judgments. We review research regarding the origins of a sensitivity to distributive fairness, and how it relates to early sharing. Infants' sensitivity to fairness appears to be commensurate with that of school-age children: infants notice violations to fairness norms and evaluate individuals based on their fair or unfair behavior. However, it may differ in other ways: there is no evidence that infants punish unfair individuals. Sharing behavior plays a role in both the developmental emergence of, and subsequent individual differences in, infants' fairness concerns. These results motivate novel questions, such whether infants can entertain other models of fairness, whether infants' socio-moral concerns hang together, and the relationship early fairness sensitivities and later fair behavior., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The ability to reason about fairness plays a defining role in the development of morality. Thus, researchers have long been interested in understanding when and how a sensitivity to fairness first develops. Here, we examined infants' ability to use fairness information in selecting social partners. Using a novel experimental paradigm that combined pre-recorded stimuli with an active behavioral measure, we tested whether infants preferred to socially engage with an individual they had previously seen behave fairly or unfairly. After viewing an individual distribute goods to third parties either equally (i.e., 3:3 distribution) or unequally (i.e., 5:1 distribution), both 13- and 17-month-old infants selectively chose to engage in a social interaction with (i.e., take a toy from) an individual who distributed resources equally. The use of a novel paradigm to assess infants' fairness preferences demonstrates that infants' previously established fairness preferences extend across different, more demanding paradigms, and may therefore be more enduring in nature. Together, these findings provide new insights into the nature of infants' fairness representations, and fill in key gaps in the developmental timeline of infants' ability to use fairness information in their consideration of potential social partners. In sum, these findings build on previous research by demonstrating that infants not only hold an expectation that resources should be distributed fairly, they also preferentially interact with those who have previously done so. The early-emerging ability to both reason about and use fairness information may play an influential role in the development of complex prosocial behaviors related to morality more broadly.

The present research investigated the developmental trajectory of infants' fairness expectations from 6 to 15 months of age (N = 150). Findings revealed a developmental transition in infants' fairness expectations between 6 and 12 months, as indicated by enhanced visual attention to unfair outcomes of resource distribution events (a 3:1 distribution) relative to fair outcomes (a 2:2 distribution). The onset of naturalistic sharing behavior predicted infants' fairness expectations at transitional ages. Beyond this period of developmental transition, the presence of siblings and infants' prompted giving behavior predicted individual differences in infants' fairness concerns. These results provide evidence for the role of experience in the acquisition of fairness expectations and reveal early individual differences in such expectations., (© 2016 The Authors. Child Development © 2016 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

False-belief reasoning, defined as the ability to reason about another person's beliefs and appreciate that beliefs can differ from reality, is an important aspect of perspective taking. We tested 266 individuals, at various ages ranging from 3 to 92 years, on a continuous measure of false-belief reasoning (the Sandbox task). All age groups had difficulty suppressing their own knowledge when estimating what a naïve person knew. After controlling for task-specific memory, our results showed similar false-belief reasoning abilities across the preschool years and from older childhood to younger adulthood, followed by a small reduction in this ability from younger to older adulthood. These results highlight the relative similarity in false-belief reasoning abilities at different developmental periods across the lifespan.

Previous research has found that within the first year of life infants possess rich knowledge about social structures (i.e., that some individuals are dominant over other individuals) as well as expectations about resource distributions (i.e., that resources are typically distributed equally to recipients). We investigated whether infants' expectations about resource distribution can be modulated by information about the dominance structure between the recipients. We first replicated the finding that infants attribute a stable dominance hierarchy to a pair of individuals when their goals conflicted and one individual yielded to the other (Expt. 1), and that this sensitivity is not driven by lower-level perceptual factors (Expt. 2). In Experiments 3-5, we tested our main hypothesis that infants' attention to equal and unequal distributions varies as a function of prior social dominance information. We first replicated and extended prior work by establishing that infants looked significantly longer to unequal than equal resource distributions when no prior information about dominance was provided about recipients (Expt. 3). Critically, following social dominance information, infants looked significantly longer to an equal distribution of resources than a distribution that favored the dominant individual (Expt. 4), and looked significantly longer when the submissive individual received more resources compared to when the dominant individual received more resources (Expts. 4 and 5). Together, these findings suggest that infants expect resources to align with social dominance structures., (Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The ability to interpret choices as enduring preferences that generalize beyond the immediate situation gives adults a powerful means of predicting and explaining others' behavior. How do infants come to recognize that current choices can be driven by generalizable preferences? Although infants can encode others' actions in terms of goals (Woodward, 1998), there is evidence that 10-month-olds still fail to generalize goal information presented in one environment to an event sequence occurring in a new environment (Sommerville & Crane, 2009). Are there some circumstances in which infants interpret others' goals as generalizable across environments? We investigate whether the vocalizations a person produces while selecting an object in one room influences infants' generalization of the goal to a new room. Ten-month-olds did not spontaneously generalize the actor's goal, but did generalize the actor's goal when the actor initially accompanied her object selection with a statement of preference. Infants' generalization was not driven by the attention-grabbing features of the statement or the mere use of language, as they did not generalize when the actor used matched nonspeech vocalizations or sung speech. Infants interpreted the goal as person-specific, as they did not generalize the choice to a new actor. We suggest that the referential specificity of accompanying speech vocalizations influences infants' tendency to interpret a choice as personal rather than situational. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).)

This study aimed to specify the neural mechanisms underlying the link between low household income and diminished executive control in the preschool period. Specifically, we examined whether individual differences in the neural processes associated with executive attention and inhibitory control accounted for income differences observed in performance on a neuropsychological battery of executive control tasks. The study utilized a sample of preschool-aged children (N = 118) whose families represented the full range of income, with 32% of families at/near poverty, 32% lower income, and 36% middle to upper income. Children completed a neuropsychological battery of executive control tasks and then completed two computerized executive control tasks while EEG data were collected. We predicted that differences in the event-related potential (ERP) correlates of executive attention and inhibitory control would account for income differences observed on the executive control battery. Income and ERP measures were related to performance on the executive control battery. However, income was unrelated to ERP measures. The findings suggest that income differences observed in executive control during the preschool period might relate to processes other than executive attention and inhibitory control.

Given the centrality of prosociality in everyday social functioning, understanding the factors and mechanisms underlying the origins of prosocial development is of critical importance. This experiment investigated whether experience with reciprocal object exchanges can drive the developmental onset of sharing behavior. Seven-month-old infants took part in 2 laboratory visits to assess their sharing behavior and ability to release objects. During the intervening 7- to 14-day period parents led infants in an intervention in which they were either encouraged to release objects into a container (bucket condition, n = 20), or share objects with the parent in the context of reciprocal object exchanges (sharing condition, n = 20). Results showed that infants in the sharing condition shared significantly more than infants in the bucket condition following the intervention, and infants in the sharing condition significantly increased their sharing behavior across the 2 visits. Parental empathy moderated the effect of this sharing intervention, but frequency of practice did not. These results suggest that reciprocal turn-taking in dyadic object-exchange interactions may facilitate the early emergence of sharing behavior, and this effect is mediated by parental empathy. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Recent evidence suggests that infants possess a rudimentary sensitivity to fairness: infants expect resources to be distributed fairly and equally, and prefer individuals that distribute resources fairly over those that do so unfairly. The goal of the present work was to determine whether infants' evaluations of fair and unfair individuals also includes an understanding that fair individuals are worthy of praise and unfair individuals are worthy of admonishment. After watching individuals distribute goods fairly or unfairly to recipients, 15-month-old (Experiments 1 and 2) and 13-month-old (Experiment 3) infants took part in a test phase in which they saw only the distributors' faces accompanied by praise or admonishment. Across all experiments, infants differentially shifted their visual attention to images of the fair and unfair distributors as a function of the accompanying praise or admonishment, although the direction in which they did so varied by age. Thus, by the start of the second year of life, infants appear to perceive fair individuals as morally praiseworthy and unfair individuals as morally blameworthy.

Research has established that the body is fundamentally involved in perception: bodily experience influences activation of the shared neural system underlying action perception and production during action observation, and bodily characteristics influence perception of the spatial environment. However, whether bodily characteristics influence action perception and its underlying neural system is unknown, particularly in early ontogeny. We measured grip strength in 12-month-old infants and investigated relations with mu rhythm attenuation, an electroencephalographic correlate of the neural system underlying action perception, during observation of lifting actions performed with differently weighted blocks. We found that infants with higher grip strength exhibited significant mu attenuation during observation of lifting actions, whereas infants with lower grip strength did not. Moreover, a progressively strong relation between grip strength and mu attenuation during observation of lifts was found with increased block weight. We propose that this relation is attributable to differences in infants' ability to recognize the effort associated with lifting objects of different weights, as a consequence of their developing strength. Together, our results extend the body's role in perception by demonstrating that bodily characteristics influence action perception by shaping the activation of its underlying neural system., (© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

The current study explores the neural correlates of action perception and its relation to infants' active experience performing goal-directed actions. Study 1 provided active training with sticky mittens that enables grasping and object manipulation in prereaching 4-month-olds. After training, EEG was recorded while infants observed images of hands grasping toward (congruent) or away from (incongruent) objects. We demonstrate that brief active training facilitates social perception as indexed by larger amplitude of the P400 ERP component to congruent compared with incongruent trials. Study 2 presented 4-month-old infants with passive training in which they observed an experimenter perform goal-directed reaching actions, followed by an identical ERP session to that used in Study 1. The second study did not demonstrate any differentiation between congruent and incongruent trials. These results suggest that (1) active experience alters the brains' response to goal-directed actions performed by others and (2) visual exposure alone is not sufficient in developing the neural networks subserving goal processing during action observation in infancy.

Empathy emerges in children's overt behavior around the middle of the second year of life. Younger infants, however, exhibit arousal in response to others' emotional displays, which is considered to be a precursor to fully developed empathy. The goal of the present study was to investigate individual variability in infants' arousal toward others' emotional displays, as indexed by 12- and 15-month-old infants' (n = 49) pupillary changes in response to another infant's emotions, and to determine whether such variability is linked to parental empathy and prosociality, as indexed via self-report questionnaires. We found that increases in infants' pupil dilation in response to others' emotional displays were associated with aspects of parental empathy and prosociality. Specifically, infants who exhibited the greatest arousal in response to others' emotions had parents who scored highly on empathic perspective taking and self-reported altruism. These relations may have been found because arousal toward others' emotions shares certain characteristics with empathic and prosocial dispositions. Together, these results demonstrate the presence of early variability in a precursor to mature empathic responding in infancy, which is meaningfully linked to parents' empathic dispositions and prosocial behaviors.

Action perception links have been argued to support the emergence of action understanding, but their role in infants' perception of distal goals has not been fully investigated. The current experiments address this issue. During the development of means-end actions, infants shift their focus from the means of the action to the distal goal. In Experiment One, we evaluated whether this same shift in attention (from the means to the distal goal) when learning to produce multi-step actions is reflected in infants' perception of others' means-end actions. Eight-months-old infants underwent active training in means-end action production and their subsequent analysis of an observed means-end action was assessed in a visual habituation paradigm. Infants' degree of success in the training paradigm was related to their subsequent interpretation of the observed action as directed at the means versus the distal goal. In Experiment Two, observational and control manipulations provided evidence that these effects depended on the infants' active engagement in the means-end actions. These results suggest that the processes that give rise to means-end structure in infants' motor behavior also support the emergence of means-end structure in their analysis of others' goals.

Planning actions in anticipation of object weight is fundamental to skilled action production. The present study investigated whether infants can apply weight information gained from direct actions on objects in order to plan their actions according to object weight in a novel and indirect motor context. In the present study, two groups of 12-month-old infants were provided with experience acting directly on two blocks of different weights and colors (70 versus 470 g; red versus yellow). Subsequently, infants were administered a novel task in which the same blocks (standard condition; n = 60), or blocks of the reversed color-weight pairings (switch condition; n = 60), were placed out-of-reach, on top of a cloth, and infants were encouraged to retrieve the block by acting on the cloth. Infants in the switch condition produced more failed cloth pulls when retrieving the 470 g block, due to inadequate generation of anticipatory force, relative to infants in the standard condition. This demonstrates that infants' force on the cloth was prospectively generated based on their mental representation of the supported block's weight, which was formed through their previous direct actions on the object. Thus, infants use information about the weight of an object in order to anticipate how to obtain that object in a novel and indirect problem-solving context.

By 15 months of age infants are sensitive to violations of fairness norms as assessed via their enhanced visual attention to unfair versus fair outcomes in violation-of-expectation paradigms. The current study investigated whether 15-month-old infants select social partners on the basis of prior fair versus unfair behavior, and whether infants integrate social selections on the basis of fairness with the race of the distributors and recipients involved in the exchange. Experiment 1 demonstrated that after witnessing one adult distribute toys to two recipients fairly (2:2 distribution), and another adult distribute toys to two recipients unfairly (1:3 distribution), Caucasian infants selected fair over unfair distributors when both distributors were Caucasian; however, this preference was not present when the fair actor was Asian and the unfair actor was Caucasian. In Experiment 2, when fairness, the race of the distributor, and the race of the recipients were fully crossed, Caucasian infants' social selections varied as a function of the race of the recipient advantaged by the unfair distributor. Specifically, infants were more likely to select the fair distributor when the unfair recipient advantaged the Asian (versus the Caucasian) recipient. These findings provide evidence that infants select social partners on the basis of prior fair behavior and that infants also take into account the race of distributors and recipients when making their social selections.

A total of 48 preschoolers (ages 3, 4, and 5) received four tasks modelled after prior work designed to assess the development of "episodic foresight". For each task, children encountered a problem in one room and, after a brief delay, were given the opportunity in a second room to select an item to solve the problem. Importantly, after selecting an item, children were queried about their memory for the problem. Age-related changes were found both in children's ability to select the correct item and their ability to remember the problem. However, when we controlled for children's memory for the problem, there were no longer significant age-related changes on the item choice measure. These findings suggest that age-related changes in children's performance on these tasks are driven by improvements in children's memory versus improvements in children's future-oriented thinking or "foresight" per se. Our results have important implications for how best to structure tasks to measure children's episodic foresight, and also for the relative role of memory in this task and in episodic foresight more broadly.

Action perception is selective in that observers attend to and encode certain dimensions of action over others. But how flexible is action perception in its selection of perceptual information? One possibility is that observers consistently attend to particular dimensions of action over others across different contexts. Another possibility, tested here, is that observers flexibly vary their attention to different dimensions of action based on the context in which action occurs. We investigated 9.5-month-old infants' and adults' ability to attend to drop height under varying contexts-aiming to drop an object into a narrow container versus a wide container. We predicted differential attention to increases in aiming height for the narrow container versus the wide container because an increase in aiming height has a differential effect on success (i.e., getting the object into the container) depending on the width of the container. Both adults and infants showed an asymmetry in their attention to aiming height as a function of context; in the wide container condition increases and decreases in aiming height were equally detectable, whereas in the narrow container condition observers more readily discriminated increases over decreases in aiming height. These results indicate that action perception is both selective and flexible according to context, aiding in action prediction and infants' social-cognitive development more broadly., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

A novel task, using a continuous spatial layout, was created to investigate the degree to which (in centimeters) 3-year-old children's (N = 63), 5-year-old children's (N = 60), and adults' (N = 60) own privileged knowledge of the location of an object biased their representation of a protagonist's false belief about the object's location. At all ages, participants' knowledge of the object's actual location biased their search estimates, independent of the attentional or memory demands of the task. Children's degree of bias correlated with their performance on a classic change-of-location false belief task, controlling for age. This task is a novel tool for providing a quantitative measurement of the degree to which self-knowledge can bias estimates of others' beliefs., (© 2013 The Authors. Child Development © 2013 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

Recent evidence suggests adults and infants selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object. The current research investigated whether this bias stems from infants' processing of the functional consequences of grasps: understanding that different grasps afford different future actions. A habituation paradigm assessed 10-month-old infants' (N = 62) understanding of the functional consequences of precision and whole-hand grasps in others' actions, and infants' own precision grasping abilities were also assessed. The results indicate infants understood the functional consequences of another's grasp only if they could perform precision grasps themselves. These results highlight a previously unknown aspect of early action understanding, and deepen our understanding of the relation between motor experience and cognition., (© 2012 The Authors. Child Development © 2012 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.)

Recent evidence suggests that adults selectively attend to features of action, such as how a hand contacts an object, and less to configural properties of action, such as spatial trajectory, when observing human actions. The current research investigated whether this bias develops in infancy. We utilized a habituation paradigm to assess 4-month-old and 10-month-old infants' discrimination of action based on featural, configural, and temporal sources of action information. Younger infants were able to discriminate changes to all three sources of information, but older infants were only able to reliably discriminate changes to featural information. These results highlight a previously unknown aspect of early action processing, and suggest that action perception may undergo a developmental process akin to perceptual narrowing., (© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.)

A critical question for developmental psychologists concerns how representations in infancy are best characterized. Past and current research provides paradoxical evidence regarding the nature of early representations: in some ways, infants appear to build concrete and specific representations that guide their online perception and understanding of different events; in other ways, infants appear to possess abstract representations that support inferences regarding unseen event outcomes. Characterizing the nature of early representations across domains is a central charge for developmentalists because this task can provide important information regarding the underlying learning process or processes that drive development. Yet, little existing work has attempted to resolve this paradox by characterizing the ways in which infants' representations may have both abstract and concrete elements. The goal of this chapter is to take a close look at infants' early representations of goal-directed action in order to describe the nature of these representations. We first discuss the nature of representations of action that infants build through acting on the world and argue that these representations possess both concrete and abstract elements. On the one hand, infants appear to build representations of action that stress goal-relevant features of actions in an action- or event-specific fashion, suggesting specificity or concreteness. On the other hand, these representations are sufficiently abstract to not only drive action but also support infants' perception of others actions and to support inferences regarding unseen action outcomes. We next discuss evidence to suggest that by the end of the first year of life, infants possess increasingly abstract representations of the actions of others and use contextual cues, including linguistic statements accompanying action, to flexibly specify the level of representational specificity. We further consider the possibility that language may play a role in infants' ability to build more abstract representations of goal-directed action.

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to understand mental states, is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Previous research has documented marked advances in ToM in preschoolers, and declines in ToM in older-aged adults. In the present study, younger (n=37), middle-aged (n=20), and older (n=37) adults completed a continuous false belief task measuring ToM. Middle-aged and older adults exhibited more false belief bias than did younger adults, irrespective of language ability, executive function, processing speed, and memory. The authors conclude that ToM declines from younger to older adulthood, independent of age-related changes to domain-general cognitive functioning.

Human cooperation is a key driving force behind the evolutionary success of our hominin lineage. At the proximate level, biologists and social scientists have identified other-regarding preferences--such as fairness based on egalitarian motives, and altruism--as likely candidates for fostering large-scale cooperation. A critical question concerns the ontogenetic origins of these constituents of cooperative behavior, as well as whether they emerge independently or in an interrelated fashion. The answer to this question will shed light on the interdisciplinary debate regarding the significance of such preferences for explaining how humans become such cooperative beings. We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis--most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms--of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation. Future work of this kind will help determine to what extent uniquely human sociality and morality depend on other-regarding preferences emerging early in life.

Four-year-olds were more accurate at learning causal structures from their own actions when they were allowed to act first and then observe an experimenter act, as opposed to observing first and then acting on the environment. Children who discovered the causal efficacy of events (as opposed to confirming the efficacy of events that they observed another discover) were also more accurate than children who only observed the experimenter act on the environment; accuracy in the confirmation and observation conditions was at similar levels. These data suggest that while children learn from acting on the environment, not all self-generated action produces equivalent causal learning.

For adults, prior information about an individual's likely goals, preferences or dispositions plays a powerful role in interpreting ambiguous behavior and predicting and interpreting behavior in novel contexts. Across two studies, we investigated whether 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of an ambiguous action sequence was facilitated by seeing prior instances in which the actor directly pursued and obtained her goal, and whether infants could use this prior information to understand the actor's behavior in a new context. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the goal preview impacted infants' subsequent action understanding, but only if the preview was delivered in the same room as the subsequent action sequence. Experiment 2 demonstrated that infants' failure to transfer prior goal information across situations arose from a change in the room per se and not other features of the task. Our results suggest that infants may use their understanding of simple actions as a leverage point for understanding novel or ambiguous actions, but that their ability to do so is limited to certain types of contextual changes.

Perception of the social world in terms of agents and their intentional relations is fundamental to human experience. In this chapter, we review recent investigations into the origins of this fundamental ability that trace its roots to the first year of life. These studies show that infants represent others' actions not as purely physical motions, but rather as actions directed at goals and objects of attention. Infants are able to recover intentional relations at varying levels of analysis, including concrete action goals, higher-order plans, acts of attention, and collaborative goals. There is mounting evidence that these early competencies are strongly influenced by infants' own experience as intentional agents. Action experience shapes infants' action perception.

Prior work suggests that active experience affects infants' understanding of simple actions. The present studies compared the impact of active and observational experience on infants' ability to identify the goal of a novel tool-use event. Infants either received active training and practice in using a cane to retrieve an out-of-reach toy or had matched observational experience before taking part in a habituation paradigm that we used to assess infants' ability to identify the goal of another person's tool-use acts. Active training alone facilitated 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of the tool-use event. Active experience using tools may enable infants to build motor representations of tool-use events that subsequently guide action perception and support action understanding.

The development of speech perception during the 1st year reflects increasing attunement to native language features, but the mechanisms underlying this development are not completely understood. One previous study linked reductions in nonnative speech discrimination to performance on nonlinguistic tasks, whereas other studies have shown associations between speech perception and vocabulary growth. The present study examined relationships among these abilities in 11-month-old infants using a conditioned head-turn test of native and nonnative speech sound discrimination, nonlinguistic object-retrieval tasks requiring attention and inhibitory control, and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (L. Fenson et al., 1993). Native speech discrimination was positively linked to receptive vocabulary size but not to the cognitive control tasks, whereas nonnative speech discrimination was negatively linked to cognitive control scores but not to vocabulary size. Speech discrimination, vocabulary size, and cognitive control scores were not associated with more general cognitive measures. These results suggest specific relationships between domain-general inhibitory control processes and the ability to ignore variation in speech that is irrelevant to the native language and between the development of native language speech perception and vocabulary.