When faced with entities with potentially ambiguous category membership, adult category judgments are strongly biased toward dangerous and distinctive properties. For example, a cyanide-water mixture is categorized as cyanide. We used a developmental approach to better understand this cross-domain effect, which we term the asymmetric…

Children often infer that descriptive group norms (i.e., how a group is) are prescriptive (i.e., how group members "should be"), and this descriptive-to-prescriptive tendency, which biases children against non-conformity, declines with age. We tested whether this age-related decline diverged across different types of processing. Children…

Children and adults show behavioral evidence of psychological overlap between their early, non-symbolic numerical concepts and their later-developing symbolic numerical concepts. An open question is to what extent the common cognitive signatures observed between different numerical notations are coupled with physical overlap in neural processes.…

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 265) responded to eight scenarios presented on an eye tracker. Each trial involved a character who encounters a perpetrator who had previously enacted positive (P), negative (N), or both types of actions toward him or her in varying sequences (NN, PP, PN, and NP). Participants predicted the character's…

Appropriate behavior in relation to an object often requires judging whether it is owned and, if so, by whom. The authors propose accounts of how people make these judgments. Our central claim is that both judgments often involve making inferences about object history. In judging whether objects are owned, people may assume that artifacts (e.g.,…

The biasing effect of pain sensitivity information and the impact of facial activity on observers' judgments of pain intensity of children with autism were examined. Observers received information that pain experience in children with autism is either the same as, more intense than, or less intense than children without autism. After viewing six…