Inductive Inferences Across Time and Identity: Are Category Members More Alike Than Single Individuals?

Young children tend to expect that 2 members of the same category will share properties, yet they frequently deny that an individual's properties will remain stable across time and context. Two experiments, involving 72 four- to five-year-olds, 72 seven- to eight-year-olds, and 76 undergraduates, explored the factors that lead children to generalize properties across and within individuals. Results suggest that adults' and older children's judgments are consistent with the principle of homogeneity—within-individual projections are more secure than across. In contrast, young children showed distinct patterns of reasoning across and within individuals, suggesting that for young children, the 2 contexts may present distinct inductive problems. This discussion focuses on how features of each problem contribute to young children's willingness to make inductive generalizations.     

Mothers’ Perceptions of Young Children,Parenting, and Young Children's Behavior Problems

Historically, research demonstrates that mothers’ attitudes and characteristics of their parenting are intertwined. More recently, mothers’ perceptions of their children are becoming a new focus of interest. To further understand the relationships among mothers’ perceptions of their young children, their parenting behaviors, and their ratings of their young children's behavior problems, this study examines the ratings of a diverse group of mothers who have young children. Correlational results of this study demonstrate that these variables are related in the anticipated directions. Further, results of regression analyses suggest that mothers’ positive and negative perceptions of their young children and their use of limit setting are important in predicting children's behavior problems. These findings suggest that interventions focusing on changing mothers’ perceptions of their young children as well as their parenting behaviors may be related to decreases in young children's behavior problems.     

Knowing How to Project Objects: Probing the Generality of Children's Action Knowledge

Previous work on the development of intuitive knowledge about trajectories has shown a dissociation between young children's aimed throwing actions, in which they are highly sensitive to the physical laws of motion, and their explicit judgments, in which they exhibit misconceptions. This research investigated the generality of children's action knowledge by having the participants project a ball with a sling. Instead of adjusting sling stretch, and hence sling force, correctly as a function of both the release height and the target distance, 5- and 6-year-olds (Experiment 1, N = 32) and, without flight feedback, even most 7- to 10-year-olds (Experiment 2, N = 96) considered distance only and ignored the height dimension. Similarly, children's judgments of the required sling stretch tended to follow a distance-only rule, especially with children younger than 9 years of age. These results show that young children's action knowledge exhibited in throwing does not generalize to arbitrary means of force production. They further suggest that there is no developmental trend toward such generalization in the age range examined.     

Young children's self‐benefiting lies and their relation to executive functioning and theory of mind

It is well established that children lie in different social contexts for various purposes from the age of 2 years. Surprisingly, little is known about whether very young children will spontaneously lie for personal gain, how self‐benefiting lies emerge, and what cognitive factors affect the emergence of self‐benefiting lies. To bridge this gap in the literature, we situated children between 2 and 4 years of age in a zero‐sum game where children must lie to their opponent if they wanted to win a desirable reward. We found that the majority of young children did not lie even when they experienced personal losses repeatedly. However, some children spontaneously lied during the game; as the game progressed, more children lied. Further, we found that children's theory of mind understanding and executive functioning in terms of a combination of inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility had significant positive and unique correlations with how frequently children lied for personal gain. The present results taken together with the existing findings regarding children's lies for self‐protection and politeness purposes suggest that the act of lying begins early in life. Further, its emergence and development are influenced by children's specific cognitive abilities in the domains of theory of mind understanding and executive functioning.

Highlights

• The study investigated whether very young children will spontaneously lie for personal gain.
• This study used a zero‐sum game to elicit children's self‐benefiting lies. Results showed the majority of young children did not lie, and it is related to children's theory of mind understanding and executive functioning.
• The act of lying begins early in life, and its emergence and development are influenced by children's specific cognitive abilities in the domains of theory of mind understanding and executive functioning.

     

Who gets mad,sad, scared or happy at discipline? Emotion attributions explain child externalizing behaviour

Few studies have linked parental discipline with children's emotional experiences, and not much data explore children's emotional attributions to discipline linked to externalizing behaviour. With a sample from Brazil, this study examines which emotions children most aptly attribute to a protagonist facing spanking, time-out or inductive discipline for norm violations. We hypothesized that anger, sadness, and fear would have higher attribution rates at spanking or time-out, relative to inductive discipline and that happiness would have higher attribution rates at induction relative to the other discipline modalities. We expected these findings to be more pronounced in older children. Based on emotional functions, we also tested the role of neutrality and happiness attributions to discipline in children's externalizing behaviour. A two-way MANOVA, with discipline and child age as explanatory variables, showed that children attributed more anger at time-out or spanking than at induction, and more happiness and neutrality at induction than at either time-out or spanking. Older children attributed significantly more sadness and less fear or neutrality. Hierarchical regressions showed that child externalizing behaviour was negatively related to happy attributions in discipline independently of child emotion situation knowledge or demographics. The results are interpreted in light of a functional view of emotions.     

The development of organized visual search

Visual search plays an important role in guiding behavior. Children have more difficulty performing conjunction search tasks than adults. The present research evaluates whether developmental differences in children's ability to organize serial visual search (i.e., search organization skills) contribute to performance limitations in a typical conjunction search task. We evaluated 134 children between the ages of 2 and 17 on separate tasks measuring search for targets defined by a conjunction of features or by distinct features. Our results demonstrated that children organize their visual search better as they get older. As children's skills at organizing visual search improve they become more accurate at locating targets with conjunction of features amongst distractors, but not for targets with distinct features. Developmental limitations in children's abilities to organize their visual search of the environment are an important component of poor conjunction search in young children. In addition, our findings provide preliminary evidence that, like other visuospatial tasks, exposure to reading may influence children's spatial orientation to the visual environment when performing a visual search.     

The Role of a Model's Age for Young Children's Imitation: A Research Review

The influence of a model's age on young children's behaviour has been a subject of considerable debate among developmental theorists. Despite the recent surge of interest, controversy remains about the nature of peer influence in early life. This article reviews studies that investigated the influence of a model's age on young children's behaviour in the first 5 years of life, and presents an account of seemingly mixed results. We propose that children imitate familiar behaviour for social reasons, such as in order to identify with the model or to communicate likeness. Since age is an important indicator of the degree of being alike, we propose that children are more likely to imitate familiar behaviour from peers. In contrast, we propose that children primarily imitate novel behaviour for learning reasons. Since adults are perceived as being more competent than children, children are more likely to learn from adults. We further suggest that increased peer experience leads children to evaluate peers as valuable resources for learning novel behaviour in domains in which peers are knowledgeable. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maternal correlates of 2‐year‐old American Indian children's social‐emotional development in a Northern Plains tribe

The developmental experiences of very young American Indian children today are not well documented in the current literature. The present study sought to explore the social‐emotional development of American Indian toddlers living on a Northern Plains reservation, as a function of maternal variables. Mothers completed self‐report questionnaires about their experiences and their children's development. Observer ratings of children's development also were conducted. Maternal stress, substance use/abuse, perceptions of stress in the mother–child relationship, social support, and American Indian cultural identity were significantly related to children's social‐emotional development. This study is the first to explore these relationships in a Northern Plains American Indian sample of young children and their mothers. Results suggest possible points of intervention for improving the developmental outcomes of very young American Indian children.     

Speaker reliability guides children's inductive inferences about novel properties

Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the current paper, we tested whether 3- and 5-year-old children attend to speaker reliability when they make inductive inferences about a non-obvious property of a novel artifact based on its label. Children were more likely to use a reliable speaker's label than an unreliable speaker's label when making inductive inferences. Thus, children not only prefer to learn from reliable speakers, they are also more likely to use information from reliable speakers as the basis for future inferences. The findings are discussed in light of the debate between a similarity-driven and a label-driven approach to inductive inferences.     

Life outcomes influenced by war-related experiences during the Gulf crisis

This study examined the life outcomes of children exposed to the Gulf crisis in 1990–1991. We expected war-trauma exposure and psychological distress symptoms to predict poorer educational and occupational outcomes. Participants were 151 Kuwaiti citizens who were assessed during childhood (in 1993; M age = 10.6 years), and who were reassessed 10 years later in young adulthood (in 2003; M age = 21.2 years). Participants completed measures of intelligence, war-trauma exposure, posttraumatic stress symptoms, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, intervening life events, and life outcomes. Results indicated that war-trauma exposure negatively impacted children's educational and occupational outcomes as young adults. Boys with higher levels of war-trauma exposure were less likely to attend University. Posttraumatic stress and anxiety symptoms also predicted poorer educational and occupational outcomes. However, this relationship was not significant when we accounted for children's intelligence. Depressive symptoms were not predictive of children's educational or occupational outcomes. Results suggest that war-trauma exposure may have life-altering effects on children. Tailored, early interventions are needed for children exposed to war traumas.     

Children's understanding of the earth in a multicultural community: mental models or fragments of knowledge?

Children's understanding of properties of the earth was investigated by interviewing Asian and white British classmates aged 4?8 years (N = 167). Two issues were explored: whether they held mental models of the earth ( Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992 ) or instead had fragmented knowledge ( di Sessa, 1988 ); and the influence of the children's different cultural backgrounds. Children selected from a set of plastic models and answered forced‐choice questions. Using this methodology, there were no significant differences in the overall performance of Asian and white children after language skills were partialled out. Even young children showed an emerging knowledge of some properties of the earth, but the distributions of their combinations of responses provided no evidence that they had mental models. Instead, these distributions closely resembled those that would be expected if children's knowledge in this domain were fragmented. Possible reasons for the differences between these findings and those of previous research are discussed.     

Less obscure? Pragmatics and 3–4-year-old children's semantics

Young children's understanding of the terms more and less is considered. In a context where a response bias operates in favour of appropriate responses to more, 3–4-year-old children respond to less as they do to more, apparently indicating assimilation of meaning. However, in a context where there is an absence of any response bias, children respond to less at random. Further, young children can respond appropriately to an alternative expression for the concept of lesser amount, doesn't have many. These results suggest that young children's observed difficulties with the term less do not arise from assimilating the meaning of less to that of more. Rather, difficulties with less stem from young children's failure to understand the meaning of that particular term, responses to instructions containing less being determined by pragmatic rather than semantic factors. When the context exhibits a response bias, children's responses to less are in accord with it. When there is no response bias, children guess and respond to less at random.     

Elementary school children’s attentional biases in physical and numerical space

Numbers are conceptualized spatially along a horizontal mental line. This view is supported by mounting evidence from healthy adults and patients with unilateral spatial neglect. Little is known about children's representation of numbers with respect to space. This study investigated elementary school children's directional biases in physical and numerical space to better understand the relation between space and number. We also examined the nature of spatial organization in numerical space. In two separate tasks, children (n = 57) were asked to bisect a physical line and verbally estimate the midpoint of number pairs. In general, results indicated leftward biases in both tasks, but the degree of deviation did not correlate between the tasks. In the number bisection task, leftward bias (underestimating the midpoint) increased as a function of numerical magnitude and interval between number pairs. In contrast, a rightward deviation was found for smaller number pairs. These findings suggest that different underlying spatial attentional mechanisms might be directed in physical and numerical space in young school children, which would be integrated in adulthood.     

Developmental Changes in the Consideration of Sample Diversity in Inductive Reasoning

Determining whether a sample provides a good basis for broader generalizations is a basic challenge of inductive reasoning. Adults apply a diversity-based strategy to this challenge, expecting diverse samples to be a better basis for generalization than homogeneous samples. For example, adults expect that a property shared by two diverse mammals (e.g., a lion and a mouse) is more likely to be shared by all mammals than a property that is shared by two more similar mammals (e.g., a lion and a tiger). Across four studies, we document a developmental progression in children's understanding that diverse samples provide a strong basis for generalizations, such that young children (grade 1) consistently failed to consider sample diversity within their inductive reasoning, but older children (grade 5) preferred to create diverse samples on which to base inferences about basic-level categories. These results suggest that recognizing the value of a diverse sample for inductive reasoning emerges slowly across the elementary school years.     

Modeling the Influence of Language Input Statistics on Children's Speech Production

We trained a computational model (the Chunk-Based Learner; CBL) on a longitudinal corpus of child–caregiver interactions in English to test whether one proposed statistical learning mechanism—backward transitional probability—is able to predict children's speech productions with stable accuracy throughout the first few years of development. We predicted that the model less accurately reconstructs children's speech productions as they grow older because children gradually begin to generate speech using abstracted forms rather than specific “chunks” from their speech environment. To test this idea, we trained the model on both recently encountered and cumulative speech input from a longitudinal child language corpus. We then assessed whether the model could accurately reconstruct children's speech. Controlling for utterance length and the presence of duplicate chunks, we found no evidence that the CBL becomes less accurate in its ability to reconstruct children's speech with age.     

The law of large numbers in children's diversity-based reasoning

Adults increase the certainty of their inductive inferences by observing more diverse instances. However, most young children fail to do so. The present study tested the hypothesis that children's sensitivity to instance diversity is determined by three variables: ability to discriminate among instances (Discrimination); an intuition that large numbers of instances increase the strength of conclusion (Monotonicity); ability to detect subcategories and evaluate numerical differences between the subcategories, or Extraction. A total of 219 Chinese children aged 6 to 11 were tested for sensitivity to diversity by means of Discrimination, Monotonicity, and Extraction. The results indicated that children at all ages were able to discriminate instances and attend to set size. However, only 9- and 11-year-olds demonstrated Extraction and sensitivity to diversity. Furthermore, among all children diversity scores increased linearly with the level of Extraction. These results suggest that the law of large numbers plays a role in children's diversity-based reasoning.     

ROLE OF FIRST‐YEAR MATERNAL EMPLOYMENT AND PATERNAL INVOLVEMENT IN BEHAVIORAL AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT OF YOUNG CHILDREN

Drawing on economic models of child development and attachment relationship perspectives, this study examined the effect of maternal employment in the first year after childbirth on subsequent behavioral and cognitive development in low‐income children. Analyses of data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (N = 411) revealed that despite the accompanying family income gains, maternal employment in the first year after childbirth adversely affected caregiver‐reported internalizing and externalizing behavior problems of Hispanic, Black, and White children at ages 3 and 5 years. This study also examined how paternal participation in childcare might affect children's outcomes. Results indicate that greater paternal participation eased the adverse impacts of maternal employment on internalizing behavior problems. There was no evidence that maternal employment was associated with children's memory cognitive functioning or that paternal involvement moderated children's cognitive development. These findings suggest that when early intervention programs are designed to assist low‐income families, enhancing supports (e.g., paternal involvement or parental leave) for working mothers during their child's first year may be valuable for young children's healthy development.     

TRAINING PROSOCIAL BEHAVIORS TO YOUNG CHILDREN: AN ANALYSIS OF RECIPROCITY WITH UNTRAINED PEERS

We examined the effects of a social skills training package on the play behaviors of three young girls. Two children were taught to invite their peers to play and to use social amenities during their conversations with other children. A combined reversal and multiple baseline across responses design demonstrated that both children directed more social behaviors to their classroom peers after training and that these two children's play invitations were maintained in the later absence of experimental contingencies. In addition, both target children received a greater number of play invitations from their peers during the free play periods. In contrast, a third child's play invitations were not reciprocated by peers; her invitations subsequently decreased in rate after training was discontinued. An interdependent group contingency produced a reciprocal exchange of invitations between this child and her classroom peers. A reversal design demonstrated partial maintenance of subject-peer exchanges after the group intervention was discontinued. The results obtained with the three target children suggest that peer reciprocity may facilitate the maintenance of children's play invitations over time.     

Human-centeredness is not a universal feature of young children's reasoning: Culture and experience matter when reasoning about biological entities

We consider young children's construals of biological phenomena and the forces that shape them, using Carey's (1985) category-based induction task that demonstrated anthropocentric reasoning in young urban children. Follow-up studies (including our own) have questioned the generality of her results, but they have employed quite different procedures and either have not included urban children or, when urban samples were included, have failed to reproduce her original findings. In the present study of 4–10-year-olds from three cultural communities, our procedures followed Carey's more closely and replicated her findings with young urban children. However, they yielded quite different results for young rural European American and young rural Native American children. These results underscore the importance of a complex interaction of culture and experience – including both day-to-day interactions with the natural world and sensitivity to the belief systems of the communities – in children's reasoning about the natural world.