The COVID-19 pandemic has forced children to reckon with the causal relations underlying disease transmission. What are children's theories of how COVID-19 is transmitted? And how do they understand the relation between COVID-19 susceptibility and the need for disease-mitigating behavior? We asked these questions in the context of children's…

Mind-mindedness (MM) refers to caregivers' proclivity to treat a child as having an active and autonomous mental life. It has been shown to be a powerful predictor of many developmental outcomes and to mitigate the impact of risk conditions. However, longitudinal studies on MM reporting changes over time and individual differences among mothers…

Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experience about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations--that is, to engage in higher-order…

Movements with both hands are essential to our everyday life, and it has been shown that performing asymmetric bimanual movements produces an interference effect between hands. There have been many studies--using varying methods--investigating the development of bimanual movements that show that this skill continues to evolve during childhood and…

Educational television for young children often combines factual content with fantasy. In 2 experiments, we examined 3- to 5-year-olds' reality judgments and the implications for their learning. In the 1st study, 145 children watched 3 clips featuring (respectively) a Hispanic, a Chinese American, and an Anglo character. Responses indicated…

When do children develop the ability to imagine their future lives in terms of a coherent prospective life story? We investigated whether this ability develops in parallel with the ability to construct a life story for the past and narratives about single autobiographical events in the past and future. Four groups of school children aged 9 to 15…

Mother-child play of maltreating and nonmaltreating families was analyzed when infants were 12 months old (Time 1), and 2 years old (Time 2), as a context to examine children's developing cognitive and social skills. At Time 1, infants from abusing families demonstrated less independent and more imitative behavior during play than did infants from…

Joint pretence games are implicit rule-governed activities with a normative structure: Given shared fictional stipulations, some acts are appropriate moves, others are inappropriate (i.e., mistakes). The awareness of 2- and 3-year-old children of this normative structure was explored, as indicated by their ability to not only act according to the…

Three studies addressed preschool-age children's ability to identify and remember the epistemic and imaginal origins of their mental representations. Results revealed that three-, four-, and five-year olds differed significantly in their ability to identify and remember the sources of their mental representations. Identifying and remembering…

This study tested participants' preparedness to acknowledge that an object could change as a result of magical intervention. Six- and 9-year-old children and adults treated perceived and imagined objects as being equally permanent. Adults treated a fantastic object as significantly less permanent than either perceived or imagined objects. Results…

Two experiments assessed preschoolers' ability to understand pretend transformations. Subjects were two-, three-, and four-year-olds who viewed episodes in which either one or two similar props were altered in a pretend fashion. In both the single and double transformation, children demonstrated that they could keep track of the pretend…

Studied children's grasp of make-believe transformations they had seen enacted. Children indicated the pretend outcome by choosing a picture depicting no change or a picture depicting the pretend change. Older children chose correctly, even with the addition of a picture of an irrelevant transformation, but younger children did not. Autistic…

Interviewed mothers to examine the developmental significance of preschoolers' imaginary companions. Found that relationships with invisible companions were described as sociable and friendly, whereas personified objects were usually nurtured. Object personification frequently occurred as a result of acquiring a toy; invisible friends were viewed…

Partially replicates Elkind and Bowen's (1979) investigation of adolescent egocentrism. Studies the relations between imaginary audience and operational thought by testing children and adolescents on a Piagetian-based written test of operational thought and the Imaginary Audience Scale. (Author/AS)

Two studies examined 19 preschoolers' ability to distinguish between pretense and reality, testing whether emotionally charged events can cause children to lend probability to pretense. Subjects were assigned to various conditions including termination or no termination of pretense and emotionally colored pretense play scenarios. Found that, even…