The influence of culture on cognitive development is well established for school age and older children. But almost nothing is known about how different parenting and socialization practices in different cultures affect infants' and young children's earliest emerging cognitive and social-cognitive skills. In the current monograph, we report a…

We investigated whether infants comprehend others' nonverbal communicative intentions directed to a third person, in an "overhearing" context. An experimenter addressed an assistant and indicated a hidden toy's location by either gazing ostensively or pointing to the location for her. In a matched control condition, the experimenter performed…

Human infants imitate others' actions "rationally": they copy a demonstrator's action when that action is freely chosen, but less when it is forced by some constraint (Gergely, Bekkering & Kiraly, 2002). We investigated whether enculturated chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) also imitate rationally. Using Gergely and colleagues' (2002) basic procedure,…

This study investigated 2-year-olds' understanding of others' intentions in a social learning context. After seeing a demonstration of how to open a box, children in two "No Prior Intention" conditions were less likely than those in "Prior Intention" conditions to open the box themselves when the adult unsuccessfully tried to open it. Results…

Gergely, Bekkering, and Kiraly (2002) demonstrated that 14-month-old infants engage in "rational imitation." To investigate the development and flexibility of this skill, we tested 12-month-olds on a different but analogous task. Infants watched as an adult made a toy animal use a particular action to get to an endpoint. In 1 condition there was a…

Twelve- and 18-month-olds played with 2 adults and 2 new toys. For a third toy, one adult left the room while the child and other adult played with it. This adult returned, looked at the 3 toys, expressed excitement, and asked "Can you give it to me?" Infants at both ages were able to do so, suggesting that 1-year-olds understand other persons as…

We argue for the importance of processes of shared intentionality in children's early cognitive development. We look briefly at four important social-cognitive skills and how they are transformed by shared intentionality. In each case, we look first at a kind of individualistic version of the skill--as exemplified most clearly in the behavior of…

Recent research has established closer links between language, cognition, and social life than Piaget or Vygotsky imagined. Connections have been established between object permanence development and acquisition of disappearance words and the quantity and quality of child-adult joint attentional social interactions and children's early word…