Understanding others' perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement…

Understanding others' perspectives and integrating this knowledge in social interactions is challenging for young children; even adults struggle with this skill. While young children show the capacity to understand what others can and cannot see under supportive laboratory conditions, more research is necessary to understand how children implement…

The ability to make inferences about what one's peers know is critical for social interaction and communication. Three experiments (n = 309) examined the curse of knowledge, the tendency to be biased by one's knowledge when reasoning about others' knowledge, in children's estimates of their peers' knowledge. Four- to 7-year-olds were taught the…

The current research aims at constructing a developmentally sensitive mindreading scale (i.e., a battery of tasks measuring different aspects of mindreading ability in children from 1 to 3.5 years of age). Over 300 Polish children were tested at six-month intervals with 48 different tasks designed to measure mindreading ability (for a total of six…

Wayfinding is one of the most important skills that children have to learn in order to safely move in the environment. One problem that 5-year-old children encounter with wayfinding is changing their point of view to that of another person in different position in the same environment, such as that of a person opposite them whose perspective is…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between temperament and social cognition, including theory of mind and emotion understanding, in 34 preschool-aged children (aged 3-4 years). Theory of mind was measured with a belief-desire reasoning assessment, and emotion understanding was measured with an affective…

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…

Research Findings: This research examines preschoolers' use of mental state terms in naturally occurring peer conflicts in the classroom to determine how children use mental state terms for organizing their social interactions. Analyses focus on the types, frequencies, and social interactive functions of mental state terms. Utterances (N = 166)…

This study examined longitudinal relations between early measures of prosocial action in infancy as well as cognitive and social-cognitive abilities, and the sharing behaviour of preschool children. The results reveal relations between delay-of-gratification at 24 months and inhibitory control at 30 months, and children's sharing at 5 years.…

The present study examined the association between theory of mind and indirect versus physical aggression, as well as the potential moderating role of prosocial behavior in this context. Participants were 399 twins and singletons drawn from two longitudinal studies in Canada. At five years of age, children completed a theory of mind task and a…

Two separate studies suggest that the development of positive sibling relations may be related to siblings' social-cognitive skills (Stewart & Marvin, 1984) and the nature of mothers' conversations with their children (Dunn & Kendrick, 1982). The purpose of the present study was to provide a synthesis of these two studies and to demonstrate the…

Investigates relations among young preschoolers' social cognitive abilities, expression of emotions, and prosocial responses to others' emotions. Results suggested that subjects' social cognitive acuity and differential responding to emotion have heretofore been underrated. (Author/DR)

In an attempt to validate the findings of other researchers regarding the development of conceptual perspective taking, this study used Taylor's (1988) 2-tiered model to examine development of perspective taking among 40 3- to 5-year-olds. Participating were 22 males and 18 females from English-speaking backgrounds attending a preschool in…

One of the important factors contributing to the current interest in the development of social competence in preschool children is the acceptance of such competencies as appropriate outcomes in the evaluation of preschool intervention programs. Measurement of social competence is still in an early stage of development. One problem is that…

Social cognitive abilities were evaluated in 23 deaf students (3 to 6 years old) through tasks requiring spatial perspective taking, cooperation, and receptive language. As hypothesized, language ability proved to be a prediction of both other variables, with the high correlation between language and perspective taking indicating a definite…