This longitudinal study examined how nightly variations in adolescents' study and sleep time are associated with academic problems on the following day. Participants ("N" = 535, 9th grade M[subscript age] = 14.88) completed daily diaries every day for 14 days in 9th, 10th, and 12th grades. Results suggest that regardless of how much a…

Narcissism--a strong need to be admired for a grandiose self--is a problematic personality trait for children as well as adults. This study of 236 preadolescents (M age = 11.3 years; 129 girls, 107 boys) evaluated 2 intrapersonal (cognitive) pathways by which narcissism might contribute to maladjustment. The first was that narcissism combines with…

Children's sensitivity to the quality of epistemic reasons and their selective trust in the more reasonable of 2 informants was investigated in 2 experiments. Three-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (N = 90) were presented with speakers who stated different kinds of evidence for what they believed. Experiment 1 showed that children of all age groups…

Explaining inconsistency may serve as an important mechanism for driving the process of causal learning. But how might this process generate amended beliefs? One way that explaining inconsistency may promote discovery is by guiding exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior. In order to investigate this, a study with young children ranging in age…

Eye movements were recorded while sixty-two 1-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched television. Of interest was the extent to which viewers looked at the same place at the same time as their peers because high similarity across viewers suggests systematic viewing driven by comprehension processes. Similarity of gaze location increased with…

Children (aged 6-10) and adults (total N = 136) completed a novel visual perspective-taking task that allowed quantitative comparisons across age groups. All age groups found it harder to judge the other person's perspective when it differed from their own. This egocentric interference did not decrease with age, even though, overall, performance…

Six-year-old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6-year-olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (n = 40) were as inflexible when…

Research connecting children's understanding of mental states to their peer relations at school remains scarce. Previous work by the authors demonstrated that children's understanding of mental states in the context of a faux pas--a social blunder involving unintentional insult--is associated with concurrent peer rejection. The present report…

What processes do infants employ in categorizing? Infants might categorize on line as they encounter category-related entities; alternatively, infants might depend on prior experience with entities in formulating categories. These alternatives were tested in forty-four 5-month-olds. Infants who were familiarized in the laboratory with a category…

This study relies on eye tracking technology to investigate how humans perceive others' feeding actions. Results demonstrate that 6-month-olds (n = 54) anticipate that food is brought to the mouth when observing an adult feeding herself with a spoon. Still, they fail to anticipate self-propelled (SP) spoons that move toward the mouth and manual…

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…

To what extent do children understand that biological processes fall into 1 coherent domain unified by distinct causal principles? In Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 125) kindergartners are given triads of biological and psychological processes and asked to identify which 2 members of the triad belong together. Results show that 5-year-olds correctly…

Using a means-means-ends problem-solving task, this study examined whether 16-month-old walking infants (N = 28) took into account the width of a bridge as a means for crossing a precipice and the location of a handrail as a means for augmenting balance on a narrow bridge. Infants were encouraged to cross from one platform to another over narrow…

Executive control (EC) is related to mathematics performance in middle childhood. However, little is known regarding how EC and informal numeracy differentially support mathematics skill acquisition in preschoolers. A sample of preschoolers (115 girls, 113 boys), stratified by social risk, completed an EC task battery at 3 years, informal numeracy…

How and when do children develop an understanding of extraordinary mental capacities? The current study tested 56 preschoolers on false-belief and knowledge-ignorance tasks about the mental states of contrasting agents--some agents were ordinary humans, some had exceptional perceptual capacities, and others possessed extraordinary mental…