Dynamic relations during the preschool years across processes of control and understanding in the domains of emotion and cognition were examined. Participants were 263 children (42% non-White) and their mothers who were seen first when the children were 3 years old and again when they were 4. Results indicated dynamic dependence among the processes studied. Specifically, change in cognitive pro...

This study investigated the effect of evidence conflicting with preschoolers' naive theory on the patterns of their free exploratory play. The domain of shadow size was used--a relatively complex, ecologically valid domain that allows for reliable assessment of children's knowledge. Results showed that all children who observed conflicting evidence performed an unconfounded informative experime...

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds made inferences from an object's inter...

This prospective longitudinal study provides evidence of preschool-age precursors of hostile attribution bias in young school-age children, a topic that has received little empirical attention. We examined multiple risk domains, including laboratory and observational assessments of children's social-cognition, general cognitive functioning, effortful control, and peer aggression. Preschoolers (...

Large-scale human cooperation among unrelated individuals requires the enforcement of social norms. However, such enforcement poses a problem because non-enforcers can free ride on others' costly and risky enforcement. One solution is that enforcers receive benefits relative to non-enforcers. Here we show that this solution becomes functional during the preschool years: 5-year-old (but not 4-ye...

For adults, accent is an obvious indicator of a speaker's geographical background. The current study investigated whether preschoolers are sensitive to the relationship between background and accent. Experiment 1 shows that 3- to 5-year-olds believe that two speakers who share the same accent live in the same place but do not share the same personal preferences. Experiment 2 demonstrates that 4...

Three experiments investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds' (N = 240) understanding that their future or "grown-up" preferences may differ from their current ones (self-future condition). This understanding was compared to children's understanding of the preferences of a grown-up (adult-now condition) or the grown-up preferences of a same-aged peer (peer-future condition). Children's performance ac...

Children are judicious social learners. They may be particularly sensitive to communicative actions done pedagogically for their benefit, as such actions may mark important, generalizable information. Three experiments (N = 224) found striking differences in preschoolers' inductive generalization and exploration of a novel functional property, depending on whether identical evidence for the pro...