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AbstractToddlers are motivated to help others achieve their goals, but providing effective help also requires toddlers to consider what will be most helpful to another individual. Sometimes, helping requests provide conflicting information about an individual's goals, so we need to decide which information to prioritise in order to decide how is best to help. The current studies investigate how toddlers prioritise conflicting information about immediate and ultimate goals when helping. In Study 1, 2‐year‐olds were shown an opaque container of blocks (hidden blocks), a transparent container of blocks (visible blocks), and a colourful tube that plays music when a block is dropped inside. For half of the participants, both hidden and visible blocks played music but, for the other half, only the hidden blocks worked. A naïve experimenter asked for a block (immediate goal) to play music with (ultimate goal), and when both blocks were equally functional, we found that toddlers prioritised fulfilling the immediate request by providing a visible block; but when only the hidden block was functional, toddlers prioritising fulfilling the ultimate goal and helped by providing the functional but hidden block. Study 2 demonstrated that toddlers considered the experimenter's goal when helping, and not just their own attraction to the musical toy. This work adds to a growing body of literature investigating not only whether young children help, but also how young children reason when engaging in helping behaviour.

AbstractAdults and 12‐month‐old infants recognize that even unfamiliar speech can communicate information between third parties, suggesting that they can separate the communicative function of speech from its lexical content. But do infants recognize that speech can communicate due to their experience understanding and producing language, or do they appreciate that speech is communicative earlier, with little such experience? We examined whether 6‐month‐olds recognize that speech can communicate information about an object. Infants watched a Communicator selectively grasp one of two objects (target). During test, the Communicator could no longer reach the objects; she turned to a Recipient and produced speech (a nonsense word) or non‐speech (coughing). Infants looked longer when the Recipient selected the non‐target than the target object when the Communicator spoke but not when she coughed – unless the Recipient had previously witnessed the Communicator's selective grasping of the target object. Our results suggest that at 6 months, with a receptive vocabulary of no more than a handful of commonly used words, infants possess some abstract understanding of the communicative function of speech. This understanding may provide an early mechanism for language and knowledge acquisition.

In the current study we extended the research of Zuroff, Fournier, Patall, and Leybman (2010) who found that individuals differ in their use of dominant leadership (DL), coalition building (CB), and ruthless self-advancement (RSA) when trying to secure rank among peers. In this study
we examined whether the interaction of leaders' and followers' social rank styles, composed of these 3 dimensions, would influence group performance. Groups of 4 undergraduates were asked to write an article under the randomly assigned leadership of 1 group member. Hierarchical regression
revealed that under leaders high in RSA, group performance was weaker when followers were high in RSA and stronger when followers were low in CB. However, under leaders high in CB, performance was stronger when followers where either high in CB or high in RSA.