The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action

Learning Novel Skills From Iconic Gestures: A Developmental and Evolutionary Perspective

Cumulative cultural learning has been argued to rely on high-fidelity copying of other individuals' actions. Iconic gestures of actions have no physical effect on objects in the world but merely represent actions that would have an effect. Learning from iconic gestures thus requires paying close attention to the teacher's precise bodily movements-a prerequisite for high-fidelity copying. In three studies, we investigated whether 2- and 3-year-old children (N = 122) and great apes (N = 36) learn novel skills from iconic gestures. When faced with a novel apparatus, participants watched an experimenter perform either an iconic gesture depicting the action necessary to open the apparatus or a gesture depicting a different action. Children, but not great apes, profited from iconic gestures, with older children doing so to a larger extent. These results suggest that high-fidelity copying abilities are firmly in place in humans by at least 3 years of age.

The slippery and the sane: Decolonizing psychology through a study of the Indian girl-child

This article makes a case against the export of psychological intervention, as developed and practiced in the Global North, to the Indian sub-continent. It is based on the premise that differences between these places are not only sociological and cultural but also at the level of the structure of subjectivity. Leaning on my theoretical understanding of the Indian female subject’s constitution and my empirical work on participants in rural Uttarakhand, India, I posit that our call for decolonization cannot be partial.

No Participant Left Behind: Conducting Science During COVID-19

Cognitive scientists have ramped up online testing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although research conducted online solves the problem of data collection, the paucity of internet access among low-income and minority communities may reduce the diversity of study samples, and thus have an impact on the generalizability of scientific findings.

A cross-cultural investigation of young children's spontaneous invention of tool use behaviours

Through the mechanisms of observation, imitation and teaching, young children readily pick up the tool using behaviours of their culture. However, little is known about the baseline abilities of children's tool use: what they might be capable of inventing on their own in the absence of socially provided information. It has been shown that children can spontaneously invent 11 of 12 candidate tool using behaviours observed within the foraging behaviours of wild non-human apes (Reindl et al. 2016 Proc. R. Soc. B 283, 20152402. (doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.2402)). However, no investigations to date have examined how tool use invention in children might vary across cultural contexts. The current study investigated the levels of spontaneous tool use invention in 2- to 5-year-old children from San Bushmen communities in South Africa and children in a large city in Australia on the same 12 candidate problem-solving tasks. Children in both cultural contexts correctly invented all 12 candidate tool using behaviours, suggesting that these behaviours are within the general cognitive and physical capacities of human children and can be produced in the absence of direct social learning mechanisms such as teaching or observation. Children in both cultures were more likely to invent those tool behaviours more frequently observed in great ape populations than those less frequently observed, suggesting there is similarity in the level of difficulty of invention across these behaviours for all great ape species. However, children in the Australian sample invented tool behaviours and succeeded on the tasks more often than did the Bushmen children, highlighting that aspects of a child's social or cultural environment may influence the rates of their tool use invention on such task sets, even when direct social information is absent.

The development of social comparisons and sharing behavior across 12 countries

Humans are social beings, and acts of prosocial behavior may be influenced by social comparisons. To study the development of prosociality and the impact of social comparisons on sharing, we conducted experiments with nearly 2500 children aged 3-12 years across 12 countries across five continents. Children participated in a dictator game where they had the opportunity to share up to 10 of their stickers with another anonymous child. Then, children were randomized to one of two treatments. In the "shared a little" treatment children were told that another child from their school had shared 1 sticker, whereas in the "shared a lot" treatment children were told that another child from their school had shared 6 stickers in the same game. There was a strong increase in baseline sharing with age in all countries and in both treatments. The "shared a lot" treatment had a positive treatment effect in increasing sharing overall, which varied across countries. However, cross-cultural comparisons did not yield expected significant differences between collectivist and individualist countries. Our results provide interesting evidence for the development of sharing behavior by age across the world and show that social information about the sharing of peers is important for children's decision making.

Beyond Behavior: Linguistic Evidence of Cultural Variation in Parental Ethnotheories of Children's Prosocial Helping

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers' reports about their toddlers' involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children's prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups - US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European-American families - were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study's analytic focus was the linguistic form of mothers' responses to interview questions asking about the child's efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children's agency and children's prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children's contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children's agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children's autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children's helpfulness is socialized in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European-American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child's efforts to help with linguistic forms that "pivoted" to either the mother as the focal agent in the child's prosocial engagement or to reframing the child's involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children's prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community.

Hai||om children mistrust, but do not deceive, peers with opposing self-interests

During their preschool years, children from urban, Western populations increasingly use deception and mistrust to regulate social interactions with others who have opposing interests. The ontogeny of these behaviors in rural, non-Western populations remains understudied. This study assessed deception and mistrust within peer interactions among 4- to 8-year-old Hai||om children from rural Namibia (N = 64). Participants engaged in a dyadic game in which their self-interests were either aligned (cooperation condition) or opposed (competition condition) to those of their coplayers. Similar to previous evidence taken from Western participants, children mistrusted their coplayers during competition, but not during cooperation. Rates of actual deception were low in both conditions, which contrasts previous findings among Western populations. On an individual level, those children who deceived were also more likely to mistrust their peers. These results reveal novel insights on the ontogenetic primacy of mistrust over deception in young children’s peer interactions in a rural, non-Western community.

Inconvenient Samples: Modeling Biases Related to Parental Consent by Coupling Observational and Experimental Results

In studies involving human subjects, voluntary participation may lead to sampling bias, thus limiting the generalizability of findings. This effect may be especially pronounced in developmental studies, where parents serve as both the primary environmental input and decision maker of whether their child participates in a study. We present a novel empirical and modeling approach to estimate how parental consent may bias measurements of children's behavior. Specifically, we coupled naturalistic observations of parent-child interactions in public spaces with a behavioral test with children, and used modeling methods to impute the behavior of children who did not participate. Results showed that parents' tendency to use questions to teach was associated with both children's behavior in the test and parents' tendency to participate. Exploiting these associations with a model-based multiple imputation and a propensity score-matching procedure, we estimated that the means of the participating and not-participating groups could differ as much as 0.23 standard deviations for the test measurements, and standard deviations themselves are likely underestimated. These results suggest that ignoring factors associated with consent may lead to systematic biases when generalizing beyond lab samples, and the proposed general approach provides a way to estimate these biases in future research.

Exploration, Explanation, and Parent-Child Interaction in Museums

Young children develop causal knowledge through everyday family conversations and activities. Children's museums are an informative setting for studying the social context of causal learning because family members engage together in everyday scientific thinking as they play in museums. In this multisite collaborative project, we investigate children's developing causal thinking in the context of family interaction at museum exhibits. We focus on explaining and exploring as two fundamental collaborative processes in parent-child interaction, investigating how families explain and explore in open-ended collaboration at gear exhibits in three children's museums in Providence, RI, San Jose, CA, and Austin, TX. Our main research questions examined (a) how open-ended family exploration and explanation relate to one another to form a dynamic for children's learning; (b) how that dynamic differs for families using different interaction styles, and relates to contextual factors such as families' science background, and (c) how that dynamic predicts children's independent causal thinking when given more structured tasks. We summarize findings on exploring, explaining, and parent-child interaction (PCI) styles. We then present findings on how these measures related to one another, and finally how that dynamic predicts children's causal thinking. In studying children's exploring we described two types of behaviors of importance for causal thinking: (a) Systematic Exploration: Connecting gears to form a gear machine followed by spinning the gear machine. (b) Resolute Behavior: Problem-solving behaviors, in which children attempted to connect or spin a particular set of gears, hit an obstacle, and then persisted to succeed (as opposed to moving on to another behavior). Older children engaged in both behaviors more than younger children, and the proportion of these behaviors were correlated with one another. Parents and children talked to each other while interacting with the exhibits. We coded causal language, as well as other types of utterances. Parents' causal language predicted children's causal language, independent of age. The proportion of parents' causal language also predicted the proportion of children's systematic exploration. Resolute behavior on the part of children did not correlate with parents' causal language, but did correlate with children's own talk about actions and the exhibit. We next considered who set goals for the play in a more holistic measure of parent-child interaction style, identifying dyads as parent-directed, child-directed, or jointly-directed in their interaction with one another. Children in different parent-child interaction styles engaged in different amounts of systematic exploration and had parents who engaged in different amounts of causal language. Resolute behavior and the language related to children engaging in such troubleshooting, seemed more consistent across the three parent-child interaction styles. Using general linear mixed modeling, we considered relations within sequences of action and talk. We found that the timing of parents' causal language was crucial to whether children engaged in systematic exploration. Parents' causal talk was a predictor of children's systematic exploration only if it occurred prior to the act of spinning the gears (while children were building gear machines). We did not observe an effect of causal language when it occurred concurrently with or after children's spinning. Similarly, children's talk about their actions and the exhibit predicted their resolute behavior, but only when the talk occurred while the child was encountering the problem. No effects were found for models where the talk happened concurrently or after resolving the problem. Finally, we considered how explaining and exploring related to children's causal thinking. We analyzed measures of children's causal thinking about gears and a free play measure with a novel set of gears. Principal component analysis revealed a latent factor of causal thinking in these measures. Structural equation modeling examined how parents' background in science related to children's systematic exploration, parents' causal language, and parent-child interaction style, and then how those factors predicted children's causal thinking. In a full model, with children's age and gender included, children's systematic exploration related to children's causal thinking. Overall, these data demonstrate that children's systematic exploration and parents' causal explanation are best studied in relation to one another, because both contributed to children's learning while playing at a museum exhibit. Children engaged in systematic exploration, which supported their causal thinking. Parents' causal talk supported children's exploration when it was presented at certain times during the interaction. In contrast, children's persistence in problem solving was less sensitive to parents' talk or interaction style, and more related to children's own language, which may act as a form of self-explanation. We discuss the findings in light of ongoing approaches to promote the benefit of parent-child interaction during play for children's learning and problem solving. We also examine the implications of these findings for formal and informal learning settings, and for theoretical integration of constructivist and sociocultural approaches in the study of children's causal thinking.

Cross-cultural variation in how much, but not whether, children overimitate

Children from Western industrialized populations tend to copy actions modeled by an adult with high fidelity even if these actions are functionally irrelevant. This so-called overimitation has been argued to be an important driver of cumulative cultural learning. However, cross-cultural and developmental evidence on overimitation is controversial, likely due to diverging task demands regarding children's attention and memory capabilities. Here, children from a recent hunter-gatherer population (Hai||om in Namibia) were compared with urban Western children (Germany) using an overimitation procedure with minimal cognitive task demands. Although the proportion of children engaging in any overimitation was similar across the two populations, German overimitators copied irrelevant actions more persistently across tasks. These results suggest that the influence of culture on children's overimitation may be one of degree, not kind.

Psychology in the “Backyards of the World”: Experiences From India

The mind has been the subject of fascination since ancient times, and every cultural tradition has folk theories related to meaning-making, attributions, and explanations about being human. In this sense, the subject of Psychology is as old as humanity, although its rise as a global, scientific discipline is relatively recent, emerging from 20th-century Europe and America. Theoretical ideas and methods generated during the growth of the discipline were aligned with beliefs about human nature and scientific methods specific to Euro-American cultures. Although “preached” and practiced universally as a science, this culturally circumscribed and ideologically bound history of the discipline needs further examination. Rather than “thinking globally” and “acting locally,” the agenda of Psychology has been the reverse; “think locally and act globally,” as critics of mainstream Psychology have pointed out. The predominance of individual, intra-mental, laboratory-tested, quantifiable dimensions of human conduct are based subliminally on Western ideology. The alternative methods of approaching real-life experiences, literature, art, inter-mental phenomena, and other qualitative dimensions of human interactions remain relatively under-explored. The dominant mainstream Psychology is seen as an objective, measurable, and universal science that has had far-reaching consequences for ordinary people around the world. This somewhat sinister side of conventional Psychology is the subject of this article, where we argue that despite significant exceptions and scholarly dissent, the popularity and prevalence of experimental Psychology has marginalized “others” at the expense of its own progress. We use illustrations primarily from teaching, research and practice in Psychology in Indian Universities.

Connecting the Dots on the Origins of Social Knowledge

Understanding what infants know about social life is a growing enterprise. Indeed, one of the most exciting developments within psychological science over the past decade is the view that infants may come equipped with knowledge about "good" and "bad" and about "us" and "them." At the heart of this view is a seminal set of studies indicating that infants prefer helpers to hinderers and similar to dissimilar others. What a growing number of researchers now believe is that these preferences may be based on innate (i.e., unlearned) social knowledge. In this article, I consider how decades of research in developmental psychology can lead to a different way to make sense of this popular body of work. As I make connections between old observations and new theorizing-and between classic findings and contemporary research-I consider how the same preferences that are thought to emanate from innate social knowledge may instead reflect social knowledge that infants can rapidly build as they pursue relationships with their caregivers. I offer this perspective with hopes that it will inspire future work that supports or questions the ideas sketched out here and, by doing so, will broaden an understanding of the origins of social knowledge.

Early Language Experience in a Tseltal Mayan Village

Daylong at-home audio recordings from 10 Tseltal Mayan children (0;2-3;0; Southern Mexico) were analyzed for how often children engaged in verbal interaction with others and whether their speech environment changed with age, time of day, household size, and number of speakers present. Children were infrequently directly spoken to, with most directed speech coming from adults, and no increase with age. Most directed speech came in the mornings, and interactional peaks contained nearly four times the baseline rate of directed speech. Coarse indicators of children's language development (babbling, first words, first word combinations) suggest that Tseltal children manage to extract the linguistic information they need despite minimal directed speech. Multiple proposals for how they might do so are discussed.

Adolescent–Parent Relationships: Progress, Processes, and Prospects

The nature of adolescent–parent relationships has been a topic of enduring concern in developmental science. In this article, we review theory and current research on several central topics. First, we define adolescence as a developmental period and briefly discuss current theoretical and analytical approaches. Then, we consider adolescent–parent relationship quality, including developmental trends and individual differences in negative interactions, positive relationships, and conflict resolution, as well as research that examines relationship quality within different family subsystems. Next, we discuss effects of emotional variability and flexibility on parent–adolescent relationships and review research on adolescents’ and parents’ beliefs about parental authority legitimacy. This is followed by a discussion of current research on parenting effects on adolescent–parent relationships, including approaches that provide greater specificity in defining parental control and its links with relationship quality, as well as research on parental monitoring and adolescent information management. We conclude this article with directions for future research.

The Pervasive Role of Pragmatics in Early Language

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In this article, we take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early nonverbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. We link phenomena from these different literatures by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. The model specifies how different information sources (linguistic utterances, social cues, common ground) are combined when making pragmatic inferences. We present evidence in favor of this inferential view and review how pragmatic reasoning supports children's learning, comprehension, and use of language.

Neighborhood Effects on Children's Development in Experimental and Nonexperimental Research

Children's neighborhood contexts are defined by rising socioeconomic inequality and segregation. This article reviews several decades of research on how neighborhood socioeconomic conditions are associated with children's development. The nonexperimental literature suggests that the most salient neighborhood socioeconomic condition depends on the outcome—disadvantage for social, emotional, and behavioral outcomes and advantage for achievement-related outcomes. Moreover, children's cumulative exposure to neighborhood socioeconomic conditions over the first two decades of life, and possibly especially in childhood, may matter most for later development. These findings are partially supported by the few experimental studies available, and across study designs, neighborhood effects are typically modest. In order to improve our understanding of this topic, we recommend methodologically rigorous designs—experimental and nonexperimental—and comparative approaches, particularly ones addressing the complexities of development in neighborhood contexts. To guide this research, we provide an integrated framework that captures a broad and dynamic perspective including macro forces, neighborhood social processes and resources, physical features, spatial dynamics, and individual differences.

Early Development of Visual Attention: Change, Stability, and Longitudinal Associations

Visual attention is a basic mechanism of information gathering and environment selection and consequently plays a fundamental role in influencing developmental trajectories. Here, we highlight evidence for predictive associations from early visual attention to emotion regulation, executive function, language and broader cognitive ability, mathematics and literacy skills, and neurodevelopmental conditions. Development of visual attention is also multifaceted and nonlinear. In daily life, core functions such as orienting, selective filtering, and processing of visual inputs are intertwined and influenced by many other cognitive components. Furthermore, the demands of an attention task vary according to the experience, motivation, and cognitive and physical constraints of participants, while the mechanisms underlying performance may change with development. Thus, markers of attention may need to be interpreted differently across development and between populations. We summarize research that has combined multiple measurements and techniques to further our understanding of visual attention development and highlight possibilities for the future.

Measuring subjective social status in children of diverse societies

Subjective Social Status (SSS) is a robust predictor of psychological and physiological outcomes, frequently measured as self-reported placement on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status. Despite its importance, however, there are still open questions regarding how early into ontogeny SSS can be measured, and how well SSS measures can be extended to non-Western and small-scale populations. Here, we investigate the internal consistency of responses to the MacArthur ladder across four cultures by comparing responses to more explicit social comparison questions. We conduct these comparisons among children and adolescents, ages 4 to 18, in India, the United States, and Argentina, in addition to those in two indigenous communities of the Ecuadorean Amazon marked by differing degrees of market integration (total N = 363). We find that responses are consistent in all populations, except for the more remote forager-horticulturalist Ecuadorian community. We also find that, consistent with findings among American adolescents, SSS declines with age. We then assess the test-retest reliability of the MacArthur Scale across two time-points: a subset of Indian participants (N = 43) within one week, and a larger, second sample of Indian participants after one year (N = 665). We find that responses are highly correlated within one week (ρ = 0.47), and moderately correlated after one year (ρ = 0.32). These results suggest that responses to the MacArthur ladder are internally consistent and reliable among children across a range of diverse populations, though care must be taken in utilizing these measures among children of non-industrial, small-scale societies.

The Development of Cumulative Cultural Learning

Human culture is unique among animals in its complexity, variability, and cumulative quality. This article describes the development and diversity of cumulative cultural learning. Children inhabit cultural ecologies that consist of group-specific knowledge, practices, and technologies that are inherited and modified over generations. The learning processes that enable cultural acquisition and transmission are universal but are sufficiently flexible to accommodate the highly diverse cultural repertoires of human populations. Children learn culture in several complementary ways, including through exploration, observation, participation, imitation, and instruction. These methods of learning vary in frequency and kind within and between populations due to variation in socialization values and practices associated with specific educational institutions, skill sets, and knowledge systems. The processes by which children acquire and transmit the cumulative culture of their communities provide unique insight into the evolution and ontogeny of human cognition and culture.

Why intergroup variation matters for understanding behaviour

Intergroup variation (IGV) refers to variation between different groups of the same species. While its existence in the behavioural realm has been expected and evidenced, the potential effects of IGV are rarely considered in studies that aim to shed light on the evolutionary origins of human socio-cognition, especially in our closest living relatives—the great apes. Here, by taking chimpanzees as a point of reference, we argue that (i) IGV could plausibly explain inconsistent research findings across numerous topics of inquiry (experimental/behavioural studies on chimpanzees), (ii) understanding the evolutionary origins of behaviour requires an accurate assessment of species' modes of behaving across different socio-ecological contexts, which necessitates a reliable estimation of variation across intraspecific groups, and (iii) IGV in the behavioural realm is increasingly likely to be expected owing to the progressive identification of non-human animal cultures. With these points, and by extrapolating from chimpanzees to generic guidelines, we aim to encourage researchers to explicitly consider IGV as an explanatory variable in future studies attempting to understand the socio-cognitive and evolutionary determinants of behaviour in group-living animals.

Culture, carrying, and communication: Beliefs and behavior associated with babywearing

Ethnographic research suggests mother-infant physical contact predicts high levels of maternal responsiveness to infant cues, yet it is unclear whether this responsiveness is driven by the act of physical contact or by underlying beliefs about responsiveness. We examine beliefs and behavior associated with infant carrying (i.e., babywearing) among U.S. mothers and experimentally test the effect of mother-infant physical contact on maternal responsiveness. In Study 1 (N = 23 dyads), babywearing mothers were more likely to interact contingently in response to infant cues than non-babywearing mothers during an in-lab play session. In Study 2 (N = 492 mothers), babywearing predicted maternal beliefs emphasizing responsiveness to infant cues. In Study 3 (N = 20 dyads), we experimentally manipulated mother-infant physical contact in the lab using a within-subjects design and found that babywearing increased maternal tactile interaction, decreased maternal and infant object contact, and increased maternal responsiveness to infant vocalizations. Our results motivate further research examining how culturally-mediated infant carrying practices shape the infant's early social environment and subsequent development.

Cross-cultural analysis of attention disengagement times supports the dissociation of faces and patterns in the infant brain

Infants are slower to disengage from faces than non-face patterns when distracted by novel competing stimuli. While this perceptual predilection for faces is well documented, its universality and mechanisms in relation to other aspects of attention are poorly understood. We analysed attention disengagement times for faces and non-face patterns in a large sample of 6-to 9-month-old infants (N = 637), pooled from eye tracking studies in socioculturally diverse settings (Finland, Malawi, South Africa). Disengagement times were classified into distinct groups of quick and delayed/censored responses by unsupervised clustering. Delayed disengagement was frequent for faces (52.1% of trials), but almost negligible for patterns (3.9% of trials) in all populations. The magnitude of this attentional bias varied by individuals, whereas the impact of situational factors and facial expression was small. Individual variations in disengagement from faces were moderately stable within testing sessions and independent from variations in disengagement times for patterns. These results point to a fundamental dissociation of face and pattern processing in infants and demonstrate that the bias for faces can be robust against distractors and habituation. The results raise the possibility that attention to faces varies as an independent, early-emerging social trait in populations.

Generic language in scientific communication

Scientific communication poses a challenge: To clearly highlight key conclusions and implications while fully acknowledging the limitations of the evidence. Although these goals are in principle compatible, the goal of conveying complex and variable data may compete with reporting results in a digestible form that fits (increasingly) limited publication formats. As a result, authors' choices may favor clarity over complexity. For example, generic language (e.g., "Introverts and extraverts require different learning environments") may mislead by implying general, timeless conclusions while glossing over exceptions and variability. Using generic language is especially problematic if authors overgeneralize from small or unrepresentative samples (e.g., exclusively Western, middle-class). We present 4 studies examining the use and implications of generic language in psychology research articles. Study 1, a text analysis of 1,149 psychology articles published in 11 journals in 2015 and 2016, examined the use of generics in titles, research highlights, and abstracts. We found that generics were ubiquitously used to convey results (89% of articles included at least 1 generic), despite that most articles made no mention of sample demographics. Generics appeared more frequently in shorter units of the paper (i.e., highlights more than abstracts), and generics were not associated with sample size. Studies 2 to 4 (n = 1,578) found that readers judged results expressed with generic language to be more important and generalizable than findings expressed with nongeneric language. We highlight potential unintended consequences of language choice in scientific communication, as well as what these choices reveal about how scientists think about their data.

Developmental sociolinguistics: Children's acquisition of language variation

Developmental sociolinguistics is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary framework that builds upon theoretical and methodological contributions from multiple disciplines (i.e., sociolinguistics, language acquisition, the speech sciences, developmental psychology, and psycholinguistics). A core assumption of this framework is that language is by its very nature variable, and that much of this variability is informative, as it is (probabilistically) governed by a variety of factors-including linguistic context, social or cultural context, the relationship between speaker and addressee, a language user's geographic origin, and a language user's gender identity. It is becoming increasingly clear that consideration of these factors is absolutely essential to developing realistic and ecologically valid models of language development. Given the central importance of language in our social world, a more complete understanding of early social development will also require a deeper understanding of when and how language variation influences children's social inferences and behavior. As the cross-pollination between formerly disparate fields continues, we anticipate a paradigm shift in the way many language researchers conceptualize the challenge of early acquisition. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Linguistic Theory Linguistics > Language Acquisition Neuroscience > Development Psychology > Language.

Perceived access to resources and young children's fairness judgments

This study examined how young children's (N = 101, M_age = 4.14 years, SD = 0.57) perceptions of their families' access to resources affect their views on others' use and distribution of familiar items. Using a simple measure involving stickers, children identified their families as either lower, higher, or in the middle in access to resources. Then, children evaluated a scenario in which an individual took crayons from one person and gave them to another in order to establish equality. Children who saw themselves as higher in access to resources determined that this was "not okay" (ownership took priority). By contrast, children who saw themselves as lower in access to resources or in the middle did not consistently prioritize equality or ownership. Thus, not only did young children think about how much or how little their families had, but these perceptions also played a role in their reasoning about the fair treatment of others.

Playing a cooperative game promotes preschoolers' sharing with third-parties, but not social inclusion

This study examined the effect of gaming context on young children's prosocial behaviors. Dyads of 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 96) played the same game cooperatively, competitively, or solitarily. After playing the game for a total of ten minutes, sharing with and social inclusion of uninvolved third-parties as well as free play with previous co-players was observed. Children shared less with third-parties after playing the game competitively than after playing it cooperatively. Playing a solitary game resulted in intermediate levels of sharing. The structure of the game did not differentially impact measures of social inclusion or free play.

Young Children Are Wishful Thinkers: The Development of Wishful Thinking in 3- to 10-Year-Old Children

Previously, research on wishful thinking has found that desires bias older children's and adults' predictions during probabilistic reasoning tasks. In this article, we explore wishful thinking in children aged 3- to 10-years-old. Do young children learn to be wishful thinkers? Or do they begin with a wishful thinking bias that is gradually overturned during development? Across five experiments, we compare low- and middle-income United States and Peruvian 3- to 10-year-old children (N = 682). Children were asked to make predictions during games of chance. Across experiments, preschool-aged children from all backgrounds consistently displayed a strong wishful thinking bias. However, the bias declined with age.

(Re)Introducing Vygotsky's Thought: From Historical Overview to Contemporary Psychology

Theories formulated by Russian psychologist and educator Lev Vygotsky currently range from being applied and celebrated across multiple contexts to be considered outdated. In this paper, we maintain that such inconsistency in application stems from the overreliance on translated or reformulated Vygotskian theories, the attempts to understand these ideas in isolation from the scientific historical context of their development, and the impact of Vygotsky's personal life circumstances on the development of his scholarship. It is known that Vygotsky's untimely death prevented him from elaborating on his theoretical views and expanding his early empirical work. We suggest that Vygotsky's scholarship could be better understood in light of the core principles that transcend all aspects of his work. In this paper, we elaborate on two such core principles: theories of language development and their relation to the integrated systemic approach to psychological development. We argue that although linguistic and historical boundaries have shaped the common perception of Vygotskian theories in anglophone research in a specific way, there is a potential for a renewed application of these theories to modern psychology that might be especially relevant in light of the increasingly interdisciplinary character of the modern science. To support our argument, we provide a brief overview and examples of potential connections between Vygotsky's scholarship with contemporary landscape in psychological science. The paper presents a brief introduction to the topic of Vygotskian work and its application to modern psychology, rather than an addition to the field of Vygotskian scholarship. It is geared toward non-Vygotskian scholars and invites researchers working in interdisciplinary areas of psychology.

The System for Coding Interactions and Family Functioning (SCIFF) in low-income and urban adolescents

Reliable, brief, and cost-effective methods to assess parenting are critical for advancing etiological research and translational efforts within parenting science. In the current study, we adapted the System for Coding Interactions and Family Functioning (SCIFF) for use among a sample of mostly racial minority adolescents aged 15 years old, growing up in a low-income urban setting. A multiethnic team coded videotapes of a family interaction task designed to elicit conflict. First, we assessed the reliability of SCIFF codes (N = 187; 54% female; 77% African American). Second, we tested whether SCIFF codes assessing harsh parenting, positive parenting, dyadic conflict, and dyadic closeness converged with parent-child reports of the same constructs. Third we explored links between observed harsh and positive parenting in early childhood (ages 3 and 5) and SCIFF codes at age 15. Our training and SCIFF coding protocols produced high interrater reliability. In support of convergent validity, we found specificity in the associations between negative aspects of parenting across methods: the SCIFF harsh parenting and dyadic conflict codes uniquely converged with concurrent parent-child reports of the same constructs. There was a longitudinal cross-construct association between more observed harshness in early childhood and lower dyadic closeness at age 15. Finally, the convergence of the SCIFF codes with other parenting measures was similar by gender and for families living below or above 200% of the poverty line. A modified version of the SCIFF can be used with reliability in low-income urban samples with variation in gender and race. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Intergenerational continuity in alcohol misuse: Maternal alcohol use disorder and the sequelae of maternal and family functioning

Early onset of alcohol use is associated with a host of detrimental outcomes. As such, understanding the complex etiology of early onset alcohol use for prevention purposes is an important goal. Specific environmental stressors within the family (i.e., financial stress, negative parental well-being and negative family climate) heighten the risk of early onset alcohol use; however, the extent to which these factors are set in motion by prior maternal history of alcohol misuse has yet to be investigated. We used prospective, longitudinal data from 385 mother-child dyads to examine the link between a maternal alcohol use disorder and her child's early onset of alcohol use through the sequelae of maternal financial strain, maternal depressive symptoms, maternal excessive alcohol use, and negative family climate. Results indicate that a maternal alcohol use disorder itself, and the confluence of a maternal alcohol use disorder, subsequent financial strain, and depressive symptoms produce a negative family climate. In turn, a negative family climate increases the likelihood of alcohol use by the age of 15 among offspring. Moreover, we demonstrate that the cascade of consequences on maternal and family functioning linking a maternal alcohol use disorder to her child's early onset of alcohol use is proximal in nature, unfolding concurrently rather than in yearly spans of time. We discuss the implications of these findings with respect to the etiology of early onset alcohol use (and extant theoretical models) and prevention programming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Burkinabe Children’s Acquisition and Construction of Astronomical Knowledge

Knowledge acquisition and construction in astronomy is a difficult process, as the scientific concepts are mainly counterintuitive. Few studies in this domain have sought to understand children’s conceptual development by focusing on the characteristics of their developmental context. Our aim was thus to enhance current understanding of knowledge development in astronomy by studying children in a cultural context where the scientific worldview is not the dominant one. To this end, we interviewed 120 middle-class children from Burkina Faso (approximately 50% girls) in Grades 1, 3, 5, and 8 about their understanding of the Earth’s shape and the day–night cycle. Our results showed that first and third graders’ responses mainly relied on everyday observations of the Earth (i.e., flat) and a geocentric vision of the day–night cycle, but some scientific elements did appear in the fifth and eighth graders’ answers, probably owing to the science lessons they received at school. The present study shows that (a) when they are congruent, everyday observations, initial knowledge and everyday testimony, constitute a strong basis for children’s knowledge construction in astronomy and (b) even in Grade 8, after they have been exposed to classroom teaching of astronomy that promotes a scientific worldview, Burkinabe children have a mainly hybrid knowledge, mixing the scientific worldview with their own initial one. We can therefore confirm Jegede’s assertion that, for some non-Western children, nothing short of a revolution is needed to acquire a full scientific understanding and put aside traditional beliefs.

"I've Only Just Heard About It": Complementary and Alternative Medicine Knowledge and Educational Needs of Clinical Psychologists in Indonesia

Background and objectives: The inadequate knowledge of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) among health professionals may put their clients at risk because clients would then find information about CAM from unreliable sources. Clinical psychologists (CPs), as health professionals, also have the opportunity to provide psychoeducation on the latest scientific CAM research for their clients. The current study aimed to explore knowledge and educational needs regarding CAM among CPs in Indonesia because previous studies on exploring CAM knowledge and educational needs regarding CAM were primarily conducted in Western countries. Materials and Methods: Data were collected through semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 43 CPs in public health centers (PHCs) in Indonesia. Most interviews were conducted at the PHCs where the participants worked and lasted for 55 minutes on average. The interview recordings were transcribed and were analyzed using deductive thematic analysis. Results: Five main themes emerged within participants' responses regarding CAM knowledge and educational needs. First (CAM understanding), participants' responses ranged from those with little or no prior knowledge of CAM treatments and uses, to those with much greater familiarity. Second (source of knowledge), participants' access ranged widely in terms of references, from popular to scientific literature. Third (why is it important?), participants identified CAM as an essential part of Indonesian culture and considered it therefore crucial to have this cultural knowledge. Fourth (the challenges and what is needed?), the challenges for improving participants' knowledge came from personal and institutional levels. Fifth (what and how to learn?), participants advised that only CAM treatments that fit in brief psychotherapy sessions should be introduced in professional training. Conclusions: This qualitative study discovered that CAM was neither well-known nor understood widely. Participants advised that professional associations and health institutions should work together in enhancing knowledge of CAM and incorporating CAM education into psychology education.

Infant gaze following depends on communicative signals: An eye-tracking study of 5- to 7-month-olds in Vanuatu

Gaze is considered a crucial component of early communication between an infant and her caregiver. When communicatively addressed, infants respond aptly to others' gaze by following its direction. However, experience with face-to-face contact varies across cultures, begging the question whether infants' competencies in receiving others' communicative gaze signals are universal or culturally specific . We used eye-tracking to assess gaze-following responses of 5- to 7-month olds in Vanuatu, where face-to-face parent-infant interactions are less prevalent than in Western populations. We found that-just like Western 6-month-olds studied previously-5- to -7-month-olds living in Vanuatu followed gaze only, when communicatively addressed. That is, if presented gaze shifts were preceded by infant-directed speech, but not if they were preceded by adult-directed speech. These results are consistent with the notion that early infant gaze following is tied to infants' early emerging communicative competencies and rooted in universal mechanisms rather than being dependent on cultural specificities of early socialization.

Differential developmental courses of implicit and explicit biases for different other-race classes

We investigated the developmental courses of both implicit and explicit racial biases in relation to the perceived social status of outgroups. We did so by assessing these biases among Chinese participants (N = 200, age range from 4- to 19-year-olds) toward 2 different other-race groups that differ in terms of perceived social status (i.e., Whites and Blacks). At the youngest age, children showed both implicit anti-White and anti-Black bias at similar levels. However, these biases had different patterns of age-related change: implicit anti-Black bias remained strong and stable over time, whereas implicit anti-White bias declined after age 10. For explicit bias, children showed a decline in anti-Black and anti-White bias. Implicit and explicit biases were uncorrelated at all ages. The observed age-related changes demonstrate that it is possible for patterns of biases toward different races to diverge with age, and that perceived social status may contribute to the differential developmental patterns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).