As adults, we might understand that beliefs often spread because people are strongly influenced by their friends, family, and other social connections. However, do we think those influences are strong enough to overrule direct evidence of a friend's unreliability? And do preschoolers expect people to show such biases toward friends and to…

The faces and hands of caregivers and other social partners offer a rich source of social and causal information that is likely critical for infants' cognitive and linguistic development. Previous work using manual annotation strategies and cross-sectional data has found systematic changes in the proportion of faces and hands in the egocentric…

Despite ample research on empathy development, its social origins have been understudied, particularly in the context of peer relations. This two-wave study of Swedish adolescents (N = 318; M[subscript ageT1] = 16.28, SD = 0.49; 55% females) examined longitudinal associations between youth friendships and empathy. The results showed that…

Participants ranging in age from 3 to 98 years (N = 708; approximately 60% female; 49% Caucasian, 38% Asian; 12% Other ethnicities, 1% Indigenous; modal household income > $80,000) completed a battery of tasks involving verbal ability, executive function, and perspective-taking. Wherever possible, all participants completed the same version of…

The dichotomy between explicit and implicit theory of mind remains controversial. This study proposed a developmental and social-constructionist perspective that challenges this notion through a model showing that coordination of perspectives (CoP) is a continuously developing ability in children. Our tested model comprises eight distinct…

Basic perspective taking and mentalizing abilities develop in childhood, but recent studies indicate that the use of social perspective taking to guide decisions and actions has a prolonged development that continues throughout adolescence. Here, we aimed to replicate this research and investigate the hypotheses that individual differences in…

An important aspect of perspective-taking ability is the appreciation that mental states such as beliefs, desires, and knowledge change over time. The current study focused specifically on 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' understanding that they will have knowledge in the future that they do not currently possess--for example, that when they are…

Although research has shown the effects of empathy manipulations on prejudice, little is known about the long-term relation between empathy and prejudice development, the direction of effects, and the relative effects of cognitive and affective aspects of empathy. Moreover, research has not examined within-person processes; hence, its practical…

We examined 2 hypotheses concerning the development of "audience design" by contrasting children with and without autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) in referential communication. The 2-stage hypothesis predicts that the ability to use contrastive size adjectives for ambiguity avoidance develops separately from and faster than the ability…

In 2 cross-lagged, longitudinal studies we contrasted parental talk about want in a single context versus multiple contexts. Study 1 examined thirty-two 2 year olds, with mothers describing pictures to children. Mothers could use want in zero, one, or multiple contexts. Children whose mothers used want in multiple contexts experienced a…

Recent evidence suggests that 3-year-olds can take other people's visual perspectives not only when they perceive different things (Level 1) but even when they see the same thing differently (Level 2). One hypothesis is that 3-year-olds are good perspective takers but cannot confront different perspectives on the same object (Perner, Stummer,…

We investigated the role of sociocultural (between-groups) and individual (within-group) factors on the development of preschoolers' resource-allocation preferences. We tested claims of the "joint impact hypothesis" of social values development that social-emotional understanding skills would predict the transition from simpler…

The study investigates age-related effects across the adult life span on spatial abilities (testing subabilities based on a distinction between spatial visualization, mental rotation, and perspective taking) and spatial self-assessments. The sample consisted of 454 participants (223 women and 231 men) from 20 to 91 years of age. Results showed…

Theories of social-cognitive development have attributed a foundational role to declarative joint attention. The present longitudinal study of 83 children, who were assessed on a battery of social-cognitive tasks at multiple measurement points from the age of 12 to 50 months, tested a predictive model of theory of mind (false-belief…

Young children struggle in the classic tests of appearance versus reality. In the current Study 1, 3-year-olds had to determine which of 2 objects (a deceptive or a nondeceptive one) an adult requested when asking for the "real X" versus "the one that looks like X." In Study 2, children of the same age had to indicate what a single deceptive…