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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
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January 1986 - present
Publications
Publications (52)
Third-party punishment of unfairness shows striking cross-societal variation in adults, yet we know little about where and when in development this variation starts to emerge. When do children across societies begin to pay a cost to prevent unfair sharing? We present an experimental study of third-party punishment of unfair sharing across N = 535 c...
Prosocial behavior is a distinguishing characteristic of human nature. Although prosocial behaviors emerge early in development, contextual factors play an important role in how these behaviors are manifested over development. A large body of research focuses on the trajectory of prosocial development across diverse cultures and investigating conte...
Human cooperation involves a complex web of interconnected behaviors that develop across the lifespan in conjunction with the cultural environment. While we have learned much in recent decades about the early origins of these behaviors in Western societies, we still know relatively little about: (1) how cooperative behaviors vary across cultures, (...
We know little about how parents protect and promote children’s prosocial development during humanitarian crises. This qualitative study examined Rohingya refugee parents’ psychosocial perspectives and the processes they use to socialize prosocial values and behaviours in their children. Interviews (descriptive and in-depth qualitative) were conduc...
Prosociality is a multifaceted concept referring to the many ways in which individuals care about and benefit others. Human prosociality is foundational to social harmony, happiness, and peace; it is therefore essential to understand its underpinnings, development, and cultivation. This handbook provides a state-of-the-art, in-depth account of scie...
Inequity aversion is an important factor in fairness behavior. Previous work suggests that children show more cross-cultural variation in their willingness to reject allocations that would give them more rewards than their partner—advantageous inequity—as opposed to allocations that would give them less than their partner—disadvantageous inequity....
Prosociality is essential for the success of human societies. Children’s prosocial development is found to increase in contexts that foster collaboration or emotion perspective taking and is negatively affected by exposure to extreme psychosocial trauma and adversity. Based on these findings, we assessed the effect of collaboration and emotion pers...
Research has shown that preschoolers developing in Western societies increase sharing after collaborating to earn resources, suggesting that collaboration is an important context for the development of fairness. The current study sought to explore the influence of collaboration on sharing among young children (N = 132, 3–6 years of age) developing...
Over the second and third years of life, toddlers begin to engage in helping even when it comes at a personal cost. During this same period, toddlers gain experience of ownership, which may influence their tendency to help at a cost. Whereas costly helping has been studied in Western children, who have ample access to resources, the emergence of co...
Two themes emerge from studies of the development of symbolic understanding; that development proceeds through multiple levels of understanding prior to full and reflective knowledge of the representational function of pictorial symbols, and that development is founded upon individual cognitive and social cognitive proclivities as well as on suppor...
Children across diverse societies reject resource allocations that place them at a disadvantage (disadvantageous inequity aversion; DI). In certain societies, older children also reject advantageous allocations (advantageous inequity aversion; AI). Other work demonstrates that after collaboration, children reduce inequity by sharing. However, it is...
Human prosociality is ubiquitous, even though it may be manifested differently across cultures. Low cost helping and sharing emerge early in development, and at similar levels, across cultures having vastly different sociocultural niches. Developmental trajectories for costly sharing diverge across cultures around middle childhood, in line with dif...
Adult influence on children’s altruistic behavior may differ between cultural communities. We used an experimental approach to assess the influence of adult models on children’s altruistic giving in a city in the United States and rural villages in India. Children between 3 and 8 years of age were tested with their parents in the United States (n =...
A sense of fairness plays a critical role in supporting human cooperation. Adult norms of fair resource sharing vary widely across societies, suggesting that culture shapes the acquisition of fairness behaviour during childhood. Here we examine how fairness behaviour develops in children from seven diverse societies, testing children from 4 to 15 y...
This volume synthesizes and integrates the broad literature in the subdisciplines of developmental psychology. The volume features an opening chapter by the volume editor outlining the organization of the field, as well as a concluding chapter in which the volume editor outlines future directions for developmental psychology. This volume synthesize...
Three- to five-year-old children's knowledge that pictures have a representational function for others was investigated using a pictorial false belief task. In Study 1, children passed the task at around four years, and performance was correlated with standard false belief and pictorial symbol tasks. In Study 2, the performance of children from two...
Several cognitive accounts of human communication argue for a language-independent, prelinguistic basis of human communication and language. The current study provides evidence for the universality of a prelinguistic gestural basis for human communication. We used a standardized, semi-natural elicitation procedure in seven very different cultures a...
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 serie...
Western children first show signs of mirror self-recognition (MSR) from 18 to 24 months of age, the benchmark index of emerging self-concept. Such signs include self-oriented behaviors while looking at the mirror to touch or remove a mark surreptitiously placed on the child’s face. The authors attempted to replicate this finding across cultures usi...
Preschool aged children (3 and 5 years) were asked to judge the emotion expressed in museum art under two situations; one where they observed an adult conspicuously make judgments of the emotion portrayed in paintings and a second where they were not exposed to adult judgments. In the experimental condition, children were presented with five painti...
Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by children's ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. K...
Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by children's ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. K...
In this paper a theory accounting for the development of symbolic functioning in the visual domain is presented, along with research relevant to the operation of one mechanism thought to be critical in this development: understanding of communicative intentions. The theory proposes that comprehension and production of visual symbols follows a clear...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Social precursors to symbolic understanding of pictures were examined with 100 infants ages 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 months. Adults demonstrated 1 of 2 stances toward pictures and objects (contemplative or manipulative), and then gave items to infants for exploration. For pictures, older infants (12, 15, and 18 months) emulated the adult's actions foll...
In three studies we investigated the question of whether children consider the attributes of the artist (sentience, age level, affective style, emotion) when making judgments about the traces (drawings) made by that artist. In Study 1, 2–5-year-old children were asked to find pictures drawn by a machine, an adult, an older and a younger child. Resu...
Young children's ability to understand and produce graphic symbols within an environment of social communication was investigated in two experiments. Children aged 2, 3, and 4 years produced graphic symbols of simple objects on their own, used them in a social communicative game, and responded to experimenter's symbols. In Experiment 1 (N = 48), 2-...
The impact of social scaffolding on the emergence of graphic symbol functioning was explored in a longitudinal training study. Links among graphic, language, and play domains in symbolic development were also investigated. The symbolic functioning of 16 children, who were 28 months at the outset of the study, was assessed in comprehension and produ...
This study investigated the claim that children are not able to judge artistic style when it conflicts with subject matter cues in paintings, using stimulus and methodological controls not employed previously. 6 and 9 year old children and adults were asked to judge which member of a pair of paintings looked like it was painted by the same painter...
The question addressed in this study is whether the claim that children understand the symbolic status of pictures by the middle of their third year is an overestimate of their ability. Specifically, we asked whether children use language if possible to facilitate their performance in graphic symbolic tasks. Language (availability of verbal labels)...
Young children's ability to understand and produce graphic symbols within an environment of social communication was investigated in two experiments. Children aged 2, 3, and 4 years produced graphic symbols of simple objects on their own, used them in a social communicative game, and responded to experimenter's symbols. In Experiment 1 (N = 48), 2-...
Children's sensitivity to the emotions portrayed in museum art was explored in two studies. In Study 1, children between the ages of 5 and 11 years and adults matched postcards of art works to photographs of an actress portraying one of four emotions (happy, sad, excited and calm). There was an increase over age in the consistency between children'...
The preceding papers serve as a testimony to the strength of developmental psychology in providing insight into the workings of human psychology. We have seen a range of influences, from methodological to theoretical, all having an important impact on general psychological understanding and debate. In this discussion I will attempt to review the in...
All of the papers in this series were originally presented as part of a symposium entitled, "Developmental Roots: How Developmental Psychology Can Inform Psychology", which was sponsored by the Developmental Section of the Canadian Psychological Association at their annual meeting (1991). In this symposium, researchers from a variety of traditions...
This chapter discusses structure in the process of seeing. One answer to the question of how mind is informed by the senses has been given by J. J. Gibson (1966), who stresses that the organism directly picks up information about the stimulus (i.e., structure) from the stimulus itself. All information, be it lower order—such as color—or higher orde...
Developmental trends in texture segregation were explored in an effort to clarify a claim made in the adult literature (Callaghan, 1989) that this task invokes an attentional mechanism, and thus calls for a reconsideration of traditional preattentive /attentive dichotomy views of perceptual processing. In six experiments the degree of interference...
Five experiments were designed to test whether (1) lowering the similarity of elements within a region of texture (low-similarity arrays) would interfere with texture segregation, and (2) there would be dominance of one type of property difference over another in determining an observer's choice of boundary in two-boundary (ambiguous) displays. In...
Five experiments were designed to test whether (1) lowering the similarity of elements within a region of texture (low-similarity
arrays) would interfere with texture segregation, and (2) there would be dominance of one type of property difference over
another in determining an observer’s choice of boundary in two-boundary (ambiguous) displays. In...
We investigated visual texture segregation, using a task for which reaction time to locate a discrepant quadrant in an array
of 36 elements was the dependent measure. Two dimensions of segregation were used: line orientation (horizontal vs. vertical,
horizontal vs. left diagonal, and left vs. right diagonal) and hue (9 vs. 7 Munsell color steps). L...
The interaction of hue and brightness dimensions during preattentive processing was assessed using a novel task. The method
combined the texture segregation task of Beck (1966) with the stimulus manipulations of Garner and Felfoldy (1970). Observers
were required to make field segregation judgments for textured visual arrays. Fields were segregated...
Available in film copy from University Microfilms, Inc. Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 1983. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 199-205).
