The ability to wait for a reward is a necessary capacity for economic transactions. This study is an age-related investigation of children's ability to delay gratification in an exchange task requiring them to wait for a significant reward. We gave 252 children aged 2-4 a small piece of cookie, then offered them an opportunity to wait for a…

To test young children's false belief theory of mind in a morally relevant context, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, children (N=162) at 3.5, 5.5, and 7.5 years of age were administered three tasks: prototypic moral transgression task, false belief theory of mind task (ToM), and an "accidental transgressor" task, which measured a…

Children's toys provide a rich arena for investigating conceptual flexibility, because they often can be understood as possessing an individual identity at multiple levels of abstraction. For example, many dolls (e.g., Winnie-the-Pooh) and action figures (e.g., Batman) can be construed either as characters from a fictional world or as physical…

The purpose of the two experiments reported here was to investigate whether bilingualism confers an advantage on children's conversational understanding. A total of 163 children aged 3-6 years were given a Conversational Violations Test to determine their ability to identify responses to questions as violations of Gricean maxims of conversation…

Based on the testimony of others, children learn about a variety of figures that they never meet. We ask when and how they are able to differentiate between the historical figures that they learn about (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) and fantasy characters (e.g., Harry Potter). Experiment 1 showed that both younger (3- and 4-year-olds) and older children…

This paper examines the tie between knowledge and behavior in a noun generalization context. An experiment directly comparing noun generalizations of children at the same point in development in forced-choice and yes/no tasks reveals task-specific differences in the way children's knowledge of nominal categories is brought to bear in a moment. To…

Two experiments yield data suggesting that the structure of children's concept of artifact function changes profoundly between age 5 and 7, with striking effects on problem-solving performance. This effect is not caused by differences in children's knowledge about the typical use of particular tools, but rather, is mediated by the structure of the…