Journal of Cognition and Development (J COGN DEV)

Publications in this journal

• Article: The sound of social cognition: Toddlers’ understanding of how sound influences others

  R. A. Williamson, R. Brooks, A. N. Meltzoff
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  ABSTRACT: Understanding others’ perceptions is a fundamental aspect of social cognition. Children’s construal of visual perception is well investigated, but there is little work on children’s understanding of others’ auditory perception. The current study assesses toddlers’ recognition that producing different sounds can affect others differentially—auditory perspective taking. Two- and three-year-olds were familiarized with two objects, one loud and one quiet. The adult then introduced a doll, and children were randomly assigned to one of two goals: either to wake the doll or to let her sleep. Children’s object choice and the sound intensity they produced significantly varied in the predicted direction as a function of the goal task. These findings reveal young children’s understanding of the effects of sound on other people’s behavior and psychological states.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2014;
• Article: Infants' Visual Recognition Memory for a Series of Categorically Related Items.

  Lisa M Oakes, Kristine A Kovack-Lesh
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  ABSTRACT: We examined the interactions between visual recognition memory, working memory, and categorization by examining 6-month-old infants' (N = 168) memory for individual items in a categorized list (e.g., images of dogs or cats). In Experiments 1 and 2, infants were familiarized with 6 different cats or dogs, presented one at a time on a series of 15-s familiarization trials. When the test occurred immediately after the sixth familiarization trial (Experiment 1), infants showed strong novelty preference for items presented on the fourth or fifth familiarization trial, but not for the items presented on the first three trials or on the sixth trial. When a brief (15-s) retention delay occurred between the end of the sixth trial and the test trials (Experiment 2), memory for the sixth item was enhanced, memory for the fourth item was impaired, and memory for the fifth was unchanged relative to when no retention delay was included. Experiment 3 confirmed that infants can form a memory for the first item presented. These results reveal how factors such as interference and time to consolidate influence infants' visual recognition memory as they categorize a series of items.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2013; 4(1):63-86.
• Article: Young Children's Memory for the Times of Personal Past Events.

  Thanujeni Pathman, Marina Larkina, Melissa Burch, Patricia J Bauer
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  ABSTRACT: Remembering the temporal information associated with personal past events is critical for autobiographical memory, yet we know relatively little about the development of this capacity. In the present research, we investigated temporal memory for naturally occurring personal events in 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children. Parents recorded unique events in which their children participated during a 4-month period. At test, children made relative recency judgments and estimated the time of each event using conventional time-scales (time of day, day of week, month of year, and season). Children also were asked to provide justifications for their time-scale judgments. Six- and 8-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, accurately judged the order of two distinct events. There were age-related improvements in children's estimation of the time of events using conventional time-scales. Older children provided more justifications for their time-scale judgments compared to younger children. Relations between correct responding on the time-scale judgments and provision of meaningful justifications suggest that children may use that information to reconstruct the times associated with past events. The findings can be used to chart a developmental trajectory of performance in temporal memory for personal past events, and have implications for our understanding of autobiographical memory development.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2013; 14(1):120-140.
• Article: Children's Use of Social Categories in Thinking About People and Social Relationships.

  Kristin Shutts, Caroline K Pemberton, Elizabeth S Spelke
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  ABSTRACT: A series of studies investigated White U.S. three- and four-year-old children's use of gender and race information to reason about their own and others' relationships and attributes. Three-year-old children used gender- but not race-based similarity between themselves and others to decide with whom they wanted to be friends, as well as to determine which children shared their own preferences for various social activities. Four-year-old (but not younger) children attended to gender and racial category membership to guide inferences about others' relationships, but did not use these categories to reason about others' shared activity preferences. Taken together, the findings provide evidence for three suggestions about these children's social category-based reasoning. First, gender is a more potent category than race. Second, social categories are initially recruited for first-person reasoning, but later become broad enough to support third-person inferences. Finally, at least for third-person reasoning, thinking about social categories is more attuned to social relationships than to shared attributes.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2013; 14(1):35-62.
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  Available from: educationforthinking.org

  Article: Do Children and Adults Learn Differently?

  Deanna Kuhn, Maria Pease
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  ABSTRACT: This article addresses a question that was a topic of debate in the middle decades of the 20th century but was then abandoned as interest in children's learning declined. The question is, does learning develop? In other words, does the learning process itself undergo age-related change, or does it remain invariant ontogenetically and phylogenetically, as early learning theories claimed? We suggest that new conceptions of learning make the question worth revisiting. A study is presented of 11- to 12-year-old children and young adults engaged in an identical learning task. Results support the proposal that learning comes to operate under increasing executive control in the years between middle childhood and early adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2012;
• Article: The Search for Meaning: Developmental Perspectives on Internal State Language in Autobiographical Memory.

  Robyn Fivush, Lynne Baker-Ward
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  ABSTRACT: Much of the history of psychological research on human memory has been a search for accuracy. How does individual recall match to some objective external record of what occurred? Stemming from an Ebbinghaus tradition (1885), this body of work has provided a great many answers to enduring questions about human memory. An equally fundamental issue concerning memory is the search for meaning. Whereas Bartlett (1932) is best remembered for his contributions about the reconstructive nature of memory, less attention has been paid to his quest for the way in which individuals strive to make sense of their worlds. Much of the history of psychological research on human memory has been a search for accuracy. The research presented in this issue focuses on the use of internal states language, words that convey emotion, cognition, and perspective. The use of this type of language in personal narratives is indicative of thinking about and reflecting on one's experience. This form of processing may be especially important when experiencing stressful and aversive events. The individual experiencing highly emotional events may have to work harder to process and understand the event both as it is occurring and in retrospect. This special issue consists of creative and thought-provoking examinations of children's memory for events that are real and rare. Consequently, the investigations were logistically and methodologically complex and are in some regards exploratory as well as conceptually rich. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2012;
• Article: What Should I Do? Behavior Regulation by Language and Paralanguage in Early Childhood.

  Margaret Friend
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  ABSTRACT: This article explores the functional significance of affective messages for behavior in early childhood. Previous research indicates that children's affective judgments are influenced more by what is said than by how it is said. Of particular interest is the extent to which this tendency toward literal interpretation has real consequences for behavior. The effect of consistent and conflicting affective messages on child behavior was assessed in a social-referencing procedure. What was said had a stronger effect than facial and vocal paralanguage on 56 4-yr-old children's exploration of novel objects. This suggests that the lexical bias evident in children's interpretations reflects a genuine developmental transition in the primary cues on which attributions are based, and these cues have direct consequences for behavior regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2012;
• Article: Reply to the commentaries on perceptual and conceptual processes in infancy.

  Jean M. Mandler
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  ABSTRACT: Responds to comments by S. Carey (see record 2001-16715-002), E. Gibson (see record 2001-16715-003), K. Nelson (see record 2001-16715-004), P. C. Quinn and P. D. Eimas (see record 2001-16715-005), and J. S. Reznick (see record 2001-16715-006) on the present author's original article (see record 2001-16715-001) which discussed the differences between perceptual categorization and conceptual categorization in infant development. J. Mandler defends her theory by examining each point made by the commentators. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2012;
• Article: The emergence of category representations during infancy: Are separate and conceptual processes required?

  Paul C. Quinn, Peter D. Eimas
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  ABSTRACT: Comments on the article by J. M. Mandler (see record 2001-16715-001) which discussed the differences between perceptual categorization and conceptual categorization in infant development. The present authors discuss primarily the development of the initial categorical and later conceptual representation for animals, a global mental entity. They also discuss the information (knowledge) that underlies this representation, of which motion is particularly important in their view and that of Mandler. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2012;
• Article: Preschool Children's Understanding of Conflicting Desires.

  Kimberly Wright Cassidy, Maura Cosetti, Ressa Jones, Emily Kelton, Valerie Meier Rafal, Lisa Richman, Heather Stanhaus
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  ABSTRACT: This study examines the conditions under which 3-year-olds can use the desires of others to predict others' behavior. In Study 1, children were highly successful in predicting the actions of an agent based on that agent's desires when they were explicitly told about the agent's desires, even when the agent's desires were strongly different from the children's own. Study 2 showed that 3-year-olds could also predict the actions of an agent when they had to infer the agent's desires from the previous good and bad experiences of the agent and from information about the agent's general behavioral preferences. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that children had difficulty predicting an agent's behavior when they both had to infer the desire of the agent and this desire conflicted with their own desires. These results suggest that preschoolers' desire reasoning is sophisticated but also may be influenced by the processing demands of the task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2012;
• Article: Spanish-Speaking Parent-Child Emotional Narratives and Children's Social Skills

  Diana Leyva, Mónica Berrocal, Virginia Novilos
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  ABSTRACT: We examined whether parents’ content and style when discussing past positive and negative emotional experiences with their children were concurrently and predictively linked to prekindergarteners’ social skills. Sixty-five low-income Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads discussed a past positive and a negative emotional experience at the beginning of prekindergarten. Narratives were coded for parents’ elaborative style and emotion resolution, cause and attribution. Children's emotional and cognitive-processing words were also coded. Children's social problem-solving skills and prosocial behaviors were assessed at the beginning and at the end of prekindergarten. Concurrently, children's social problem-solving skills were related to parents’ elaborative style when discussing positive emotional experiences and children's use of cognitive-processing words when discussing negative emotional experiences. Predictively, children whose parents offered resolutions when discussing negative emotional experiences at the beginning of prekindergarten had better social problem-solving skills at the end of prekindergarten. Parents who talked about causes or attributed emotions when discussing past emotional experiences did not necessarily have children with better social skills. Findings suggest that parents’ scaffolding when discussing past positive and negative emotional experiences offers opportunities for prekindergarteners to develop social abilities crucial for school readiness.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 09/2012;
• Article: Conflicting social cues: 14- and 24-month-old infants’ reliance on gaze and pointing cues in word learning

  Markus Paulus, Paula Fikkert
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  ABSTRACT: Language acquisition is a process embedded in social routines. Despite considerable attention in research to its social nature, little is known about developmental differences in the relative priority of certain social cues over others during early word learning. Employing an eye‐tracking paradigm, we presented 14‐month‐old infants, 24‐month‐old infants, and adults with movies in which an actor repeatedly gazed at one and pointed to the other of two objects while presenting them with a novel word. The results show that the 14‐month‐old infants pay more attention to a model’s eye gaze when learning to map a novel word to a referent, whereas 24‐month‐old infants and adults rely more on pointing cues. Our results provide evidence for a developmental change in the relative priority of pointing vs. eye gazing cues in language acquisition.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2012;
• Article: The use of questions as problem-solving strategies in early childhood

  C.H. Legare, C.M. Mills, A.L. Souza, R. Yasskin, S. Clayton
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2012;
• Article: The Social Context of Infant Intention Understanding

  Sarah Dunphy-Lelii, Jennifer LaBounty, Jonathan D Lane, Henry M Wellman
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2012;
• Article: Sources of Cognitive Inflexibility in Set-Shifting Tasks: Insights Into Developmental Theories From Adult Data.

  Anthony Steven Dick
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  ABSTRACT: Two experiments examined processes underlying cognitive inflexibility in set-shifting tasks typically used to assess the development of executive function in children. Adult participants performed a Flexible Item Selection Task (FIST) that requires shifting from categorizing by one dimension (e.g., color) to categorizing by a second orthogonal dimension (e.g., shape). The experiments showed performance of the FIST involves suppression of the representation of the ignored dimension; response times for selecting a target object in an immediately-following oddity task were slower when the oddity target was the previously-ignored stimulus of the FIST. However, proactive interference from the previously relevant stimulus dimension also impaired responding. The results are discussed with respect to two prominent theories of the source of difficulty for children and adults on dimensional shifting tasks: attentional inertia and negative priming. In contrast to prior work emphasizing one over the other process, the findings indicate that difficulty in the FIST, and by extension other set-shifting tasks, can be attributed to both the need to shift away from the previously attended representation (attentional inertia), and the need to shift to the previously ignored representation (negative priming). Results are discussed in relation to theoretical explanations for cognitive inflexibility in adults and children.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 01/2012; 13(1):82-110.
• Article: Parts and Relations in Young Children's Shape-Based Object Recognition

  Elaine Augustine, Linda B. Smith, Susan S. Jones
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  ABSTRACT: The ability to recognize common objects from sparse information about geometric shape emerges during the same period in which children learn object names and object categories. Hummel and Biederman's (199212. Hummel , J. E. , & Biederman , I. ( 1992 ). Dynamic binding in a neural network for shape recognition . Psychological Review , 99 ( 3 ), 480 – 517 . [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]View all references) theory of object recognition proposes that the geometric shapes of objects have two components—geometric volumes representing major object parts, and the spatial relations among those parts. In the present research, 18- to 30-month-old children's ability to use separate information about object part shapes and part relations to recognize both novel (Experiment 1) and common objects (Experiment 2) was examined. Children succeeded in matching novel objects on part shapes despite differences in part relations but did not match on part relations when there were differences in part shapes. Given known objects, children showed that they did represent the relational structure of those objects. The results support the proposal that children's representations of the geometric structures of objects are built over time and may require exposure to multiple instances of an object category. More broadly, the results suggest that the distinction between object part shape and part relations as two components of object shape similarity is psychologically real and developmentally significant.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2011; 12(4):556-572.
• Article: The Effect of Plausible Versus Implausible Balance Scale Feedback on the Expectancies of 3- to 4-Year-Old Children

  Cornelia Schrauf, Josep Call, Sabina Pauen
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  ABSTRACT: Previous studies (Case, 19854. Case , R. ( 1985 ). Intellectual development: Birth to adulthood . New York , NY : Academic . View all references; Siegler, 198131. Siegler , R. S. ( 1981 ). Developmental sequences within and between concepts . Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 46 , 1 – 84 . [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]View all references) have shown that children under the age of 5 years have little understanding of balance scales when required to encode the influence of weight or distance from the fulcrum. More recently, however, Halford, Andrews, Dalton, Boag, and Zielinski (20028. Halford , G. S. , Andrews , G. , Dalton , C. , Boag , C. , & Zielinski , T. ( 2002 ). Young children's performance on the balance scale: The influence of relational complexity . Journal of Experimental Child Psychology , 81 , 417 – 445 . [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®]View all references) noted that an understanding based on weight alone is present even in 2-year-olds. In all these experiments, weight was varied using multiple objects of the same weight. Consequently, the children's decisions could have been based upon visual features (size, number) without necessarily taking the weight into account. The present study investigated whether young children are able to correctly encode the relevance of weight in influencing the behavior of a balance scale. We studied how well 3- to 4-year-old children learn to use one of two different weights (of equal appearance) to tip the scale. In the plausible condition, the heavy weight produced the desired outcome. In the implausible condition, the light weight caused the scale to tip. Only 4-year-olds' performance differed between conditions by learning more effectively in the plausible than the implausible condition. Our results suggest that children younger than 4 years of age have not yet developed clear expectations of the role of weights on the movements of a balance scale.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 10/2011; 12(4):518-536.
• Article: Children and Adults Understand That Verbal Irony Interpretation Depends on Listener Knowledge

  Elizabeth S. Nilsen, Melanie Glenwright, Vanessa Huyder
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  ABSTRACT: Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge listener interpretation of ironic intent when the listener lacked context knowledge. Adults and older children (8- to 10-year-olds), but not younger children (6- to 7-year-olds), demonstrated this recognition; their responses indicated that listeners would be less likely to interpret statements as ironic when the listeners were ignorant to an incongruent context compared with when they were knowledgeable. Second-order theory-of-mind reasoning was related to the older children's ability to shift their responses regarding listener inferences of ironic statements based on the listeners' knowledge of context.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 07/2011; 12(3):374-409.
• Article: Finding Where and Saying Where: Developmental Relationships Between Place Learning and Language in the First Year

  Frances Balcomb, Nora S. Newcombe, Katrina Ferrara
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  ABSTRACT: The relationship between emergent spatial understanding in different cognitive domains, including navigation and language, has rarely been studied using methods that allow for the examination of individual differences. In this study the authors explored emergent place learning and its relationship to early spatial language, namely prepositions, in 16- to 24-month-old children. Children were tested using a spatial task adapted from the Morris water maze, and the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. In the place-learning task, children were placed in a circular enclosure and a puzzle was hidden under the floor at one location. Before each trial, children were disoriented and placed in the maze at a different starting position. Their search types and success at finding the puzzle were coded. As expected, older children demonstrated more spatial searches and better place-learning skills (finding the goal), as well as greater overall expressive vocabulary. Place learning and language did not correlate with each other once age was partialled, with one crucial exception: a theoretically predicted correlation between prepositions and goal localization.
  Journal of Cognition and Development 07/2011; 12(3):315-331.