Love and peace across generations: Biobehavioral systems and global partnerships.

Children's environments - especially relationships with caregivers - sculpt not only developing brains but also multiple bio-behavioral systems that influence long-term cognitive and socioemotional outcomes, including the ability to empathize with others and interact in prosocial and peaceful ways. This speaks to the importance of investing resources in effective and timely programs that work to enhance early childhood development (ECD) and, by extension, reach communities at-scale. Given the limited resources currently devoted to ECD services, and the devastating impact of COVID-19 on children and communities, there is a clear need to spur government leaders and policymakers to further invest in ECD and related issues including gender and racial equity. This essay offers concrete examples of scholarly paradigms and leadership efforts that focus on child development to build a peaceful, equitable, just, and sustainable world. As scholars and practitioners, we need to continue to design, implement, assess, and revise high-quality child development programs that generate much-needed evidence for policy and programmatic changes. We must also invest in global partnerships to foster the next generation of scholars, practitioners, and advocates dedicated to advance our understanding of the bio-behavioral systems that underlie love, sociality, and peace across generations. Especially where supported by structural interventions, ECD programs can help create more peaceful, just, and socially equitable societies.

Cognitive universals and cultural variation in teaching.

We address three issues: (1) There is a need for a comprehensive multidisciplinary understanding of teaching; (2) teaching is a natural cognitive ability for humans; and (3) there is a need to incorporate the mentalistic and cultural approaches to teaching. We suggest certain research studies that can help deepen our understanding of the cognition of teaching.

Understanding of emotions and false beliefs among hearing children versus deaf children.

Emotion understanding and theory of mind (ToM) are two major aspects of social cognition in which deaf children demonstrate developmental delays. The current study investigated these social cognition aspects in two subgroups of deaf children-those with cochlear implants who communicate orally (speakers) and those who communicate primarily using sign language (signers)-in comparison to hearing children. Participants were 53 Israeli kindergartners-20 speakers, 10 signers, and 23 hearing children. Tests included four emotion identification and understanding tasks and one false belief task (ToM). Results revealed similarities among all children's emotion labeling and affective perspective taking abilities, similarities between speakers and hearing children in false beliefs and in understanding emotions in typical contexts, and lower performance of signers on the latter three tasks. Adapting educational experiences to the unique characteristics and needs of speakers and signers is recommended.

The Linguistic Affiliation Constraint and phoneme recognition in diglossic Arabic.

This study tested the effect of the phoneme's linguistic affiliation (Standard Arabic versus Spoken Arabic) on phoneme recognition among five-year-old Arabic native speaking kindergarteners (N=60). Using a picture selection task of words beginning with the same phoneme, and through careful manipulation of the phonological properties of target phonemes and distractors, the study showed that children's recognition of Standard phonemes was poorer than that of Spoken phonemes. This finding was interpreted as indicating a deficiency in the phonological representations of Standard words. Next, the study tested two hypotheses regarding the specific consequences of under-specified phonological representations: phonological encoding versus phonological processing. These hypotheses were addressed through an analysis of the relative power of distractors. The findings revealed that children's difficulty in accessing Standard Arabic phonemes was due to a difficulty in the phonological encoding of Standard words. We discuss the implications of the findings for language and literacy development in diglossic Arabic.

Young children's recognition of the intentionality of teaching.

Two studies examined the role of intention in preschoolers' understanding of teaching. Three- to 5-year-olds judged stories in which there was an intention to teach or not (teaching vs. imitation) for 4 different learning outcomes (successful, partial, failed, and unknown). They also judged 2 stories with embedded instructional intent (e.g., guided discovery learning) and several standard theory of mind tasks. There was an age-related change in the understanding of teaching. Five-year-olds distinguished teaching from imitation and recognized guided discovery learning. Understanding of imitation and false belief was related. The findings indicate that theory of mind is relevant to other means of knowledge acquisition besides perceptual access and that understanding intention could help young children to recognize instruction and identify its different forms.

Simulation based medical education: an opportunity to learn from errors.

Medical professionals and educators recognize that Simulation Based Medical Education (SBME) can contribute considerably to improving medical care by boosting medical professionals' performance and enhancing patient safety. A central characteristic of SBME is its unique approach to making (and learning from) mistakes, which is regarded as a powerful educational experience and as an opportunity for professional improvement. The basic assumption underlying SBME is that increased practice in learning from mistakes and in error management in a simulated environment will reduce occurrences of errors in real life and will provide professionals with the correct attitude and skills to cope competently with those mistakes that could not be prevented. The main message of the present paper is that this assumption, which serves as the driving force of SBME, should also serve as a starting point for critical thinking and questioning regarding the multiple aspects and components of SBME. These questions, in turn, should lead to empirical research that will provide feedback concerning changes that may be necessary in order to attain the goal of improving medical professionals' performance. Based on such research, SBME will be held accountable for its outcomes, i.e. whether its educational techniques indeed result in decreased occurrence of errors or not, and whether the ability to cope with the errors that do occur is significantly improved. The first of three issues that were addressed concerns individuals' experience of performing mistakes. It is suggested that in order to benefit fully from the experience of performing mistakes in a simulated context, medical educators should create a balance between the emotional load associated with the experience and the professional lessons that can be learned. Furthermore, research should focus on the long-term effects of the experience in changing professionals' attitudes and behaviour. The second question concerned the contribution of the different components of the educational experience to creating the desired changes in professionals' performance. Analysis of the teaching and learning involved in each stage of the educational event should serve as the basis for research that aims at identifying the unique contribution and efficiency of each element, and defining the essential core activities of a simulated experience. Finally, the need to define a newly emerging profession-SBME educator-was addressed. The professional qualifications are, clearly, multidisciplinary and should be based on the growing experience of medical educators in training students and professionals. Defining the profession is essential in order to create academic environments in which professionals will be trained to develop and implement new programmes, accompanied by research and assessment.

The relation between desire and false belief in children's theory of mind: no satisfaction?

Belief and desire are commonly assumed to be the core mental states needed to understand others' behavior. Few studies, however, have investigated both. The current studies assessed whether young children's difficulty with false belief can be explained by desire's dominance over belief, as J. A. Fodor's (1992) nativist theory and the theory theory (K. Bartsch & H. M. Wellman, 1995) claim, and examined the processes underlying children's understanding of desire. Desire inferences of 3- to 5-year-olds were compared with false-belief responses in 4 experiments. For the 3-year-olds, no correspondence was found between desire and belief, suggesting that desire cannot explain young children's difficulty with false belief and that desire relies on different cues than does belief. The findings indicate that studying children's understanding of desire is important for forming an accurate description of theory of mind and for evaluating the different theories of its development.

Children request teaching when asking for names of objects.

We propose that in addition to children's requests for word names being a reflection of an understanding of the referential nature of words, they may also be requests for adult's teaching. These possible requests for teaching among toddlers, along with other indications, suggest that teaching may be a natural cognition that may be related to the development of theory of mind.