Recent studies have established that even infants can determine what others know based on previous visual experience. In the current study, we investigated whether 2-and 3-year-olds know what others know based on previous auditory experience. A child and an adult heard the sound of one object together, but only the child heard the sound of another…

The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…

Gergely, Bekkering, and Kiraly (2002) demonstrated that 14-month-old infants engage in "rational imitation." To investigate the development and flexibility of this skill, we tested 12-month-olds on a different but analogous task. Infants watched as an adult made a toy animal use a particular action to get to an endpoint. In 1 condition there was a…

Findings from studies exploring role of joint attentional focus in children's acquisition of language indicated that language of 24 mothers and their 15- to 21-month-olds inside episodes of joint attentional focus involved more utterances, shorter sentences, more comments, and longer conversations than outside of episodes. Also, object references…

Twelve- and 18-month-olds played with 2 adults and 2 new toys. For a third toy, one adult left the room while the child and other adult played with it. This adult returned, looked at the 3 toys, expressed excitement, and asked "Can you give it to me?" Infants at both ages were able to do so, suggesting that 1-year-olds understand other persons as…