The goal of this study was to examine the mechanisms underlying associations between neighborhood socioeconomic advantage and children's achievement trajectories between ages 54 months and 15 years. Results of hierarchical linear growth models based on a diverse sample of 1,364 children indicate that neighborhood socioeconomic advantage was…

We apply instrumental variables (IV) techniques to a pooled data set of employment-focused experiments to examine the relation between type of preschool childcare and subsequent externalizing problem behavior for a large sample of low-income children. To assess the potential usefulness of this approach for addressing biases that can confound…

In two studies, the authors investigated 2- and 3-year-old children's awareness of the normative structure of conventional games. In the target conditions, an experimenter showed a child how to play a simple rule game. After the child and the experimenter had played for a while, a puppet came (controlled by a 2nd experimenter), asked to join in,…

According to the mental-state reasoning model of suggestibility, 2 components of theory of mind mediate reductions in suggestibility across the preschool years. The authors examined whether theory-of-mind performance may be legitimately separated into 2 components and explored the memory processes underlying the associations between theory of mind…

This study examines preschoolers' causal assumptions about spatial contiguity and how these assumptions interact with new evidence in the form of conditional probabilities. Preschoolers saw a toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Children were shown evidence for the toy's activation rule in the form of patterns of probability: The…

This article reports two experiments which show that 4-year-old children can make transitive inferences when labeling strategies are precluded to prevent memory problems. (JMB)

Describes two experiments which examine the relationship between nurturance, attraction, and imitation. The results showed a significant relationship between nurturance and attraction and no relationship between nurturance and imitation. This suggests that positive relationships between nurturance and imitation are mediated by the child's…

Three studies explored preschoolers' assertions that objects come closer together when part of the distance between them is occluded. Findings indicated that preschoolers do not appear to change the geometries they use to represent space, but do show increases in the generality and explicitness with which they map spatial knowledge onto spatial…

This study examined the developmental differences in preschoolers' recognition memory while evaluating the effects of experimenter-provided labels and assessing spontaneous production of verbal mediators by preschool children. (JMB)

Examined preschoolers' ability to distinguish innocent and negligent mistakes from lies. Found that, when asked to identify a mistake or lie about a food's contact with contaminants and identify a bystander's reaction, children distinguished mistakes from lies; they could also discriminate between lies and both negligent mistakes that generate…

This study found that 3-year-olds instructed to remember a particular location in a memory task engaged in deliberate behaviors which were positively related to later recall. This was not true for 3-year-olds instructed only to wait or for 2-year-olds in either instructional condition. (JMB)

The results of this study indicate that answering young children's questions increases the frequency with which they ask questions. The evidence also suggests that children use questions partially as a means of maintaining social contact and attention with a friendly adult after their information seeking efforts have been exhausted. (JMB)

Investigates the effects of giving preschool children plans to resist distraction and their resistance in a subsequent work situation. (Author/LLK)