When young children observe pretend-play, do they interpret it simply as a type of behavior, or do they infer the underlying mental state that gives the behavior meaning? This is a long-standing question with deep implications for how "theory on mind" develops. The two leading accounts of shared pretense give opposing answers. The behavioral…

Two experiments examined whether preschoolers' difficulties on tasks that required relating pretending and knowledge (e.g., Lillard, A. S. (1993a). "Young children's conceptualization of pretense: Action or mental representational state?" "Child Development, 64," 372-386) were due to children's inability to appreciate the causal mechanism behind…

A basic problem of daily life is determining who owns what. One way that people may solve this problem is by relying on a "first possession" heuristic, according to which the first person who possesses an object is its owner, even if others subsequently possess the object. We investigated preschoolers' use of this heuristic in five experiments. In…

A wealth of human knowledge is acquired by attending to information provided by other people--but some people are more credible sources than others. In two experiments, we explored whether young children spontaneously keep track of an individual's history of being accurate or inaccurate and use this information to facilitate subsequent learning.…

Sentences that refer to categories--generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly")--are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and…