How does early social experience affect children's inferences and exploration? Following prior work on children's reasoning in pedagogical contexts, this study examined U.S. children with less experience in formal schooling and Yucatec Mayan children whose early social input is predominantly observational. In Experiment 1, U.S. 2-year-olds…

This study tested whether maternal sensitivity and child security are related during early childhood and whether such an association is found in different cultural and social contexts. Mother-child dyads (N = 237) from four different countries (Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States) were observed in naturalistic settings when children were…

Subjects from urban and rural Yucatan were tested on a short-term and incidental memory task. Urban subjects were in school, whereas most rural subjects were not. Results indicated that formal schooling is an important factor in the development of mnemonic skills in short-term memory. (ST)