In pursuing goals, people seek favorable odds. We investigated whether young children use this fact to infer goals from people's actions across two experiments on Canadian 3- to 7-year-old children (N = 316; 167 girls, 149 boys). Participants' demographic information was not formally collected, but the region is predominantly middle-class and…

Previous research has suggested that infants are able to distinguish between possible and impossible events and make basic probabilistic inferences. However, much of this research has focused on children's intuitions about past events for which the outcome is already determined but unknown. Here, we investigated children's ability to use…

Young children often deny that improbable events are possible. We examined whether children aged 5-7 (N = 300) might have more success in recognizing that these events are possible if they considered whether the events could happen in a distant country. Children heard about improbable and impossible events (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2) and about…

Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative…

Adaptive decision making in probabilistic environments requires individuals to use probabilities as weights in predecisional information searches and/or when making subsequent choices. Within a child-friendly computerized environment (Mousekids), we tracked 205 children's (105 children 5-6 years of age and 100 children 9-10 years of age) and 103…

In many decision making tasks negative feedback is probabilistic and, as a consequence, may be given when the decision is actually correct. This feedback can be referred to as nonrepresentative negative feedback. In the current study, we investigated developmental and gender related differences in such switching after nonrepresentative negative…

The joint development of trajectories of bullying perpetration and peer victimization from Grade 5 to Grade 8 and concurrent and predictive associations with parent- and child-reported symptoms of psychopathology (anxiety, depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and somatization) were examined in a large sample (N = 695) of Canadian…

Although there has been much debate over the content of children's first words, few large sample studies address this question for children at the very earliest stages of word learning. The authors report data from comparable samples of 265 English-, 336 Putonghua- (Mandarin), and 369 Cantonese-speaking 8- to 16-month-old infants whose caregivers…

In a sample of 7,695 families in the prospective, nationally representative British Millennium Cohort Study, this study examined whether characteristics of the 1st-born child predicted parents' timing and probability of having another child within 5 years after the 1st child's birth. Infant temperament was assessed with the Carey Infant…