How race and gender shape the development of social prototypes in the United States.

The present studies examined how gender and race information shape children's prototypes of various social categories. Children (N = 543; Mage = 5.81, range = 2.75-10.62; 281 girls, 262 boys; 193 White, 114 Asian, 71 Black, 50 Hispanic, 39 Multiracial, 7 Middle-Eastern, 69 race unreported) most often chose White people as prototypical of boys and men-a pattern that increased with age. For female gender categories, children most often selected a White girl as prototypical of girls, but an Asian woman as prototypical of women. For superordinate social categories (person and kid), children chose members of their own gender as most representative. Overall, the findings reveal how cultural ideologies and children's own group memberships interact to shape the development of social prototypes across childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Unintended Consequences of the Things We Say: What Generic Statements Communicate to Children About Unmentioned Categories.

Adults frequently use generic language (e.g., "Boys play sports") to communicate information about social groups to children. Whereas previous research speaks to how children often interpret information about the groups described by generic statements, less is known about what generic claims may implicitly communicate about unmentioned groups (e.g., the possibility that "Boys play sports" implies that girls do not). Study 1 (287 four- to six-year-olds, 56 adults) and Study 2 (84 four- to six-year-olds) found that children as young as 4.5 years draw inferences about unmentioned categories from generic claims (but not matched specific statements)-and that the tendency to make these inferences strengthens with age. Study 3 (181 four- to seven-year-olds, 65 adults) provides evidence that pragmatic reasoning serves as a mechanism underlying these inferences. We conclude by discussing the role that generic language may play in inadvertently communicating social stereotypes to young children.

Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children.

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science-research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and independently, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and we describe the resources we have made available on a new website (discoveriesonline.org) to help researchers get started with implementing this approach. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field.

Intentional action processing across the transition to crawling: Does the experience of self-locomotion impact infants' understanding of intentional actions?

Motor developmental milestones in infancy, such as the transition to self-locomotion, have cascading implications for infants' social and cognitive development. The current studies aimed to add to this literature by exploring whether and how crawling experience impacts a key social-cognitive milestone achieved in infancy: the development of intentional action understanding. Study 1 used a cross-sectional, age-held-constant design to examine whether locomotor (n = 36) and prelocomotor (n = 36) infants differ in their ability to process a failed intentional reaching action. Study 2 (n = 124) further probed this question by assessing how variability in locomotor infants' experience maps onto variability in their failed intentional action understanding. Both studies also assessed infants' tendency to engage in triadic interactions to shed light on whether self-locomotion impacts intentional action understanding directly or indirectly via changes in infants' interactions with social partners. Altogether, results showed no evidence for the role of self-locomotion in the development of intentional action understanding. Locomotor and prelocomotor infants did not differ in their failed action understanding or levels of triadic engagement (Study 1) and individual differences in days of crawling experience, propensity to crawl during play, and maximum crawling speed failed to predict infants' intentional action understanding or triadic engagement (Study 2). Explanations for these null findings and alternative influences on the development of intentional action understanding are considered.

What is social essentialism and how does it develop?

Social essentialism consists of the commonly held belief that certain ways of categorizing people (e.g., gender and race) reflect meaningful, fundamental distinctions found in nature-that some kind of category "essence" (e.g., something in their blood or their DNA) explains why groups of people (such as boys and girls) are different from one another. Yet as common as they are, essentialist beliefs can give rise to adverse consequences, including stereotyping and social prejudice. In this chapter, we examine the development of social essentialism. To begin, we briefly address the evidence that these beliefs are the result of developmental processes that unfold beginning in early childhood (and not something innate that children are born with). Then, we consider the nature of those processes; specifically, how basic processes underlying conceptual development give rise to different components of essentialist beliefs. We then address how different essentialist beliefs might be integrated into a coherent essentialist view of a category, and finally into a coherent essentialist view of a domain.

Developmental Changes in Strategies for Gathering Evidence About Biological Kinds.

How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources-for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non-diverse samples (e.g., two robins) and diverse samples as equivalently informative. The current study (N = 247) found that this discontinuity stems from developmental changes in standards for evaluating evidence-younger children chose to learn from samples that best approximate idealized views of what category members are supposed to be like (e.g., the fastest cheetahs), with a gradual shift across age toward samples that cover more within-category variation (e.g., cheetahs of varying speeds). These findings have implications for the relation between conceptual structure and inductive reasoning, and for the mechanisms underlying inductive reasoning more generally.

Triadic interactions support infants' emerging understanding of intentional actions.

Infants' understanding of the intentional nature of human action develops gradually across the first year of life. A key question is what mechanisms drive changes in this foundational social-cognitive ability. The current studies explored the hypothesis that triadic interactions in which infants coordinate attention between a social partner and an object of mutual interest promote infants' developing understanding of others as intentional agents. Infants' spontaneous tendency to participate in triadic engagement was assessed in a semi-structured play session with a researcher. Intentional action understanding was assessed by evaluating infants' ability to visually predict the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 1 (N = 88) revealed that 8- to 9-month-olds who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement showed better concurrent reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action. Study 2 (N = 114) confirmed these findings using a longitudinal design and demonstrated that infants who displayed more bouts of triadic engagement at 6-7 months were better at prospectively reasoning about the goal of an intentional reaching action 3 months later. Cross-lagged path analyses revealed that intentional action understanding at 6-7 months did not predict later triadic engagement, suggesting that early triadic engagement supports later intentional action processing and not the other way around. Finally, evidence from both studies revealed the unique contribution of triadic over dyadic forms of engagement. These results highlight the importance of social interaction as a developmental mechanism and suggest that infants enrich their understanding of intentionality through triadic interactions with social partners.

Revisiting the role of language in spatial cognition: Categorical perception of spatial relations in English and Korean speakers.

The spatial relation of support has been regarded as universally privileged in nonlinguistic cognition and immune to the influence of language. English, but not Korean, obligatorily distinguishes support from nonsupport via basic spatial terms. Despite this linguistic difference, previous research suggests that English and Korean speakers show comparable nonlinguistic sensitivity to the support/nonsupport distinction. Here, using a paradigm previously found to elicit cross-language differences in color discrimination, we provide evidence for a difference in sensitivity to support/nonsupport between native English speakers and native Korean speakers who were late English learners and tested in a context that privileged Korean. Whereas the former group showed categorical perception (CP) when discriminating spatial scenes capturing the support/nonsupport distinction, the latter did not. An additional group of native Korean speakers-relatively early English learners tested in an English-salient context-patterned with the native English speakers in showing CP for support/nonsupport. These findings suggest that obligatory marking of support/nonsupport in one's native language can affect nonlinguistic sensitivity to this distinction, contra earlier findings, but that such sensitivity may also depend on aspects of language background and the immediate linguistic context.