Three studies investigated toddlers' judgments and communications about how desires, perceptions, and emotions connect in people's lives and minds. Findings indicated that in appropriate circumstances, young children realized that a person's perception of desirable or undesirable objects leads to related emotional experiences. Children's…

Maintains that authors' meta-analytic findings make early competence accounts of theory of mind increasingly unlikely. Asserts that findings argue against executive function expression accounts, including that advocated by Scholl and Leslie (PS532407). Explains that meta-analytic findings directly contradict Scholl and Leslie's predictions…

The present study extends previous results demonstrating a relation between maternal discourse and child social understanding to include paternal discourse. Emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were considered as two distinctive aspects of social understanding. Participants were 106 children (54 boys and 52 girls) studied at 3.5 and…

Uses results of laboratory and natural language analyses of 2- to 4-year olds' explanations of human behavior to argue for a theory-type view of biological, psychological, and physical domains of thought. Concludes that children as young as 2 years show three different reasoning systems in their explanations of everyday phenomena, especially human…

When and in what ways do infants recognize humans as intentional actors? An important aspect of this larger question concerns when infants recognize specific human actions (e.g. a reach) as object-directed (i.e. as acting toward goal-objects). In two studies using a visual habituation technique, 12-month-old infants were tested to assess their…

Examined in 2 studies 3- to 7-year-olds and adults' connecting a person's current feelings to past experience. Found that even 3-year-olds demonstrated knowledge about connections between past events and present emotions. Children 5 years and younger revealed cogent understanding in explaining why someone who experienced a previous negative event…

The author considers memory as being composed of four categories. The fourth category--metamemory--refers to the individual's knowledge and awareness of memory or of anything pertinent to information storage and retrieval. It is that aspect of memory that deals with the how and what of memory itself. The paper first presents a model of what could…

Presents the results of three studies examining children's conception of the mind itself as an independent, active entity. Findings revealed a developing ability in children to interpret and produce statements personifying the mind and provided considerable evidence of children's movement toward a conception of the mind as an active agent…

Describes three studies that examined how young children distinguish between the real, physical world and the mental world; between objects and thoughts; and between doing something and imagining it. (HOD)

Two studies address the sequence of understandings evident in preschoolers' developing theory of mind. The first, preliminary study provides a meta-analysis of research comparing different types of mental state understandings (e.g., desires vs. beliefs, ignorance vs. false belief). The second, primary study tests a theory-of-mind scale for…

Examined whether the quality and content of everyday parent-child conversations about negative emotions differed from everyday talk about positive emotions. Found that children and parents talked about past emotions, causes of emotions, and connections between emotions and other mental states at higher rates during conversations about negative…

Examined content of explanations from 4 children in everyday conversations recorded from 2.5 to 5 years of age. Found that explanations focused on varied entities and incorporated diverse modes. Pairings of entities with explanatory modes suggested appropriately constrained yet flexible causal reasoning, consistent with hypothesis that young…

Reported are two studies which describe the early development in children of the ability to consider every one of an array of instances. Taken together with other recent studies, the data reveal early development in preschool children of a fundamental, general problem solving skill. (PCB)

Prior research demonstrates that understanding theory of mind (ToM) is seriously and similarly delayed in late-signing deaf children and children with autism. Are these children simply delayed in timing relative to typical children, or do they demonstrate different patterns of development? The current research addressed this question by testing…

Microgenetic methods were used to document young children's (N = 36; M age = 3;5) acquisition of false belief (FB) understanding and investigate developmental mechanisms. A control group received no experience with FB; 2 other groups received microgenetic sessions designed to promote FB understanding. Over consecutive weeks, microgenetic groups…