Suchergebnisse

AbstractPretend play has been extensively studied in developmental science, nevertheless important questions remain about how children engage in and navigate between pretend episodes. In this proposal, we scrutinize childhood pretense from a social cognitive developmental point of view. First, we review previous theories of pretend play structured around important questions that pinpoint some attributes of pretend episodes, such as their transient and socially defined nature. In these sections, evidence is also reviewed about children's understanding of these attributes. Following this, we describe a novel proposal of pretend play which extends recent accounts of (pretend) play (Wyman & Rakoczy, 2011; Chu & Schulz, 2020a) by exploiting the importance of social interactions in pretense. We contend that engaging in shared pretending can be considered a manifestation of and support for children's ability to participate in and set up arbitrary contextual boundaries with others. These claims are discussed with regards to how pretend play may figure into social development, its potential implications for intra- as well as intercultural variation, as well as future research.

AbstractHumans are adapted to spontaneously transfer relevant cultural knowledge to conspecifics and to fast‐learn the contents of such teaching through a human‐specific social learning system called 'pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely, 2006). Pedagogical knowledge transfer is triggered by specific communicative cues (such as eye‐contact, contingent reactivity, the prosodic pattern of 'motherese', and being addressed by one's own name). Infants show special sensitivity to such 'ostensive' cues that signal the teacher's communicative intention to manifest new and relevant knowledge about a referent object. Pedagogy offers a novel functional perspective to interpret a variety of early emerging triadic communicative interactions between adults and infants about novel objects they are jointly attending to. The currently dominant interpretation of such triadic communications (mindreading) holds that infants interpret others' object‐directed manifestations in terms of subjective mental states (such as emotions, dispositions, or intentions) that they attribute to the other person's mind. We contrast the pedagogical versus the mindreading account in a new study testing 14‐month‐olds' interpretation of others' object‐directed emotion expressions observed in a communicative cueing context. We end by discussing the far‐reaching implications of the pedagogical perspective for a wide range of early social‐cognitive competences, and for providing new directions for future research on child development.

Abstract
Successful social interactions rely on flexibly tracking and revising others' beliefs. These can be revised prospectively, new events leading to new beliefs, or retrospectively, when realizing that an attribution may have been incorrect. However, whether infants are capable of such belief revisions is an open question. We tested whether 18-month-olds can revise an attributed FB into a TB when they learn that a person may have witnessed an event that they initially thought she could not see. Infants first observed Experimenter 1 (E1) hiding two objects into two boxes. Then E1 left the room, and the locations of the objects were swapped. Infants then accompanied Experimenter 2 (E2) to the adjacent room. In the FB-revised-to-TB condition, infants observed E1 peeking into the experimental room through a one-way mirror, whereas in the FB-stays-FB condition, they observed E1 reading a book. After returning to the experimental room E1 requested an object by pointing to one of the boxes. In the FB-stays-FB condition, most infants chose the non-referred box, congruently with the agent's FB. However, in the FB-revised-to-TB condition, most infants chose the other, referred box. Thus, 18-month-olds revised an already attributed FB after receiving evidence that this attribution might have been wrong.

AbstractThe dominant view of children's memory is that it is slow to develop and is inferior to adults'. Here we pitted 4‐year‐old children against adults in a test of verbatim recall of verbal material. Parents read a novel rhyming verse (and an integrated word list) as their child's bedtime story on ten consecutive days. A group of young adults listened to the verse, matching the exposure of children. All participants subsequently performed a free‐recall of the verse, verbatim. (Parents and young adults knew they would be tested; children did not.) Four‐year‐olds significantly outperformed both their parents and the young adults. There were no significant differences in the ability to recall the gist of the verse, nor the integrated word list, allaying concerns about differences in engagement or motivation. Verbatim recall of verse is a skill amenable to practice, and children, we argue, by virtue of the prominence of verse in their culture and their reliance on oral transmission, have honed this skill to exceed adults'.

AbstractThis paper presents evidence that social categorization affects spontaneous level‐2 visual perspective taking (L2PT) differently depending on the type of social category in 8‐year‐old. In Experiment 1 (N = 46), children were paired with same‐age peers, who belonged to the same or a different minimal group. In Experiment 2 (N = 42) children participated with an adult confederate, who either shared their cultural group membership or was a member of an out‐group (inferred from a linguistic cue, accent). In Experiment 3 (N = 80), children were acting together with an adult confederate who was at the same time a member of the same or a different minimal group and shared their linguistic membership. This allowed us to investigate how these social categories influence each other. Spontaneous L2PT was not affected by the minimal group manipulation. However, accent weakened L2PT when it implied that the task partner belonged to an out‐group. When both category cues were present, accent—that could be an indicator of shared knowledge attribution—played a more pronounced role in attenuating L2PT. It is argued that social categories that are indicative of the partner's knowledge states but not ad hoc groups influence spontaneous mentalizing.