One hundred and sixty subjects from five age levels ranging from 3 to 20 years compared photographs of dogs (e.g., two different Great Danes or a Great Dane and a Doberman pinscher) and judged whether they were similar or different. (Author/MP)

Assesses whether a model of at least two levels of perspective-taking ability beyond egocentrism provides a more adequate account of the variance in subjects' responses across perspective-taking tasks. (Author/MP)

Techniques of presenting information temporally in the auditory and visual modalities and spatially in the visual modality were used to assess information processing in seven- and nine-year-old children. (JMB)

Picture-grouping and word-association tasks were used to evaluate the hypothesis that paradigmatic (same form class) word associates are not always categorical and may be a function of the child's understanding of interactive and categorical relations. (SB)

A study showed that 5- to 15-year-old children first employed Heider's commission rule, then his intentionality rule, and finally the foreseeability rule at about 11 years of age. Results suggest that both the Heider and Piaget attribution research traditions were correct in part. (RH)

Results of four experiments suggest that two-year-olds may be capable of forming inclusion relations when they hear a novel word for an object that already has a familiar name. (PCB)

Young children watched videotaped fairy tales that involved child or adult control over frightening events. Subsequently, they watched a videotape of a child having a medical exam. Children who had watched the child control fairy tales showed an enhancement, whereas children who had watched the adult control fairy tales showed a deficit, in…

Investigates whether pretend play is an area of advanced understanding with reference to certain skills that are implicated in both pretend play and a theory of mind, including the ability to (1) represent one object as two things at once; (2) see one object as representing another; and (3) represent mental representations. (MDM)

Three studies found that there was a marked increase with age from preschool to adulthood in individuals' tendency to say that persons always have some thoughts and ideas flowing through their minds. Four year olds tended to say that persons could keep their minds completely empty of ideas. (MDM)

Investigated children's representational ability as a cognitive factor underlying the suggestibility of their eyewitness memory. Found that the eyewitness memory of children lacking multirepresentational abilities or sufficient general memory abilities (most 3- and 4-year-olds) was less accurate than eyewitness memory of those with…

Four-year olds, 6-year olds, and adults were given a computer-game mental rotation task, but with no instructions on mental rotation or other mental activity. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year olds were comparable to adults in spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year olds who referred to…

Maintains that the results of Wellman, Cross, and Watson's meta-analysis on the false belief task are perfectly compatible with "early competence" accounts that posit a specific, innate, and possibly modular basis for theory of mind. Asserts that Wellman and colleagues' arguments against such views stem from mistaken assumptions…

Children more frequently specified possibilities correctly when uncertainty resided in the physical world (physical uncertainty) than in their own perspective of ignorance (epistemic uncertainty). In Experiment 1 (N=61), 4- to 6-year-olds marked both doors from which a block might emerge when the outcome was undetermined, but a single door when…

Although developmental psychologists are generally happy to endorse dissociations and gradualist views of development like Woolley's (2006), the design and interpretation of developmental research often suggests an implicit commitment to a cleaner, less dissociative, sudden-transition view of development. Such an implicit commitment may derive…