Children's inferences of moral character across different moral subdomains.

Adults use an individual's behavior in one moral subdomain to make inferences about how they will act in another moral subdomain, reflecting a tendency to attribute underlying traits to individuals. We recruited 4- to 7-year-old children from a large city in North America to investigate their ability to generalize from one moral subdomain to another and integrate these pieces of information to form trust and friendship decisions, focusing on the subdomains of helping and fairness, given their centrality to moral cognition. In Experiment 1 (N = 131; 49% female; 38% White), children watched a protagonist help or hinder another person with their goal and then engage in either a fair or an unfair resource distribution between two novel recipients; in Experiment 2 (N = 130; 52% female; 55% White), these events were reversed. We recorded the children's surprise at the second event and their willingness to trust subsequent information provided by the protagonist and to befriend her. Children selectively generalized from the initial behavior, reporting greater surprise to fair (vs. unfair) behavior after the protagonist hindered and greater surprise to the protagonist helping (vs. hindering) after she distributed resources unfairly previously. Moreover, the presence of a single moral transgression lowered children's trust and friendship judgments to chance levels. These findings demonstrate that moral transgressions (vs. moral adherence to moral norms) provide a basis for guiding children's subsequent expectations for future behavior across moral subdomains, as well as for forming social decisions regarding whether to befriend and trust individuals, for children as young as age 4 years. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering.

Across two experiments, we investigated whether infants use prior behavior to form expectations about future behavior within the moral domain, focusing on the sub-domains of fairness and help/harm. In Experiment 1, 14- to 27-month-old infants were familiarized to an agent who either helped or hindered another agent to obtain her goal. At test, infants saw the helper or hinderer perform either a fair or unfair distribution of resources to two recipients. Infants familiarized to helping looked longer to the unfair distribution than the fair distribution at test, whereas infants familiarized to hindering looked equally at both test events, suggesting that hindering led infants to suspend baseline expectations of fairness. In Experiment 2, infants saw these events in reverse. Following familiarization to fair behavior, infants looked equally to helping and hindering; in contrast, following familiarization to unfair behavior, infants looked significantly longer to helping than hindering on test, suggesting that prior unfair behavior led infants to expect the agent to hinder another agent's goals. These results suggest that infants utilize prior information from one moral sub-domain to form expectations of how an individual will behave in another sub-domain, and that this tendency seems to manifest more strongly when infants initially see hindering and unfair distributions than when they see helping and fair distributions. Together, these findings provide evidence for consilience within the moral domain, starting by at least the second year of life.

It takes two: Process praise linking trying and success is associated with greater infant persistence.

Process praise (i.e., praise for effort) facilitates childhood persistence. However, less is known about the mechanism by which process praise influences persistence in infancy. Here, we propose that well-timed process praise reinforces the link between effort and success, thus promoting persistence in young children. In Experiment 1, U.S. infants aged 17-18 months old (N = 29; 13 females; Mage = 18 months, 3 days; 76% White) and in Experiment 2, Canadian toddlers aged 17-31 months old (N = 60; 34 females; Mage = 22 months, 17 days; 40% White) participated with caregivers. Across experiments, caregiver process and general praise overlapping temporally with both trying and success related to greater persistence during a dyadic task, while praise offered only during trying or success was not. However, the effects of temporally aligned process praise were more robust than the effects of general praise. Furthermore, process praise which did not correspond to children's actions (i.e., high-volume or randomly dispersed process praise) negatively related to persistence. Thus, these findings demonstrate that young children are responsive to temporal alignment in praise and further suggest that temporal alignment especially in process praise may help form the basis for later mindset models. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Not just if, but how much: Children and adults use cost and need to make evaluations about generosity across contexts.

Evaluations of others' generosity are critical for selecting quality social partners, yet the factors which systematically affect these evaluations and whether they vary across development are still relatively unclear. Here, we establish that two key dimensions adults and children (aged 4 to 7 years) consider are the cost associated with a giving action and the need of the recipient, through six pre-registered experiments with Canadian and U.S. American participants. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that adults' and children's third-party evaluations of generosity are sensitive to variations in each factor, across several operationalizations of cost and need in both comparative and standalone contexts, suggesting cost and need can be spontaneously evoked. However, children's responses were more consistent for need scenarios than cost scenarios. In Experiments 3 and 4, we modified our scenarios to evaluate whether variations in cost and need are considered simultaneously in both generosity evaluations and affiliative preferences. Adults' and older children's (ages 6 to 7) evaluations of generosity and affiliative preferences were sensitive to both factors, but younger children did not utilize this information systematically. Importantly, in Experiments 5 and 6, adults' and older children's generosity evaluations were only sensitive to information about cost and need when the giver's actions conferred utility to a recipient, but not when actions were self-serving. Taken together, we establish robust evidence that cost and need are considered in generosity evaluations by demonstrating that Canadian and U.S. American adults and children utilize this information consistently, spontaneously, and simultaneously.

Investigating the detection of parent-child relationships in early childhood: The role of partiality in resource distributions.

By early childhood, children possess clear expectations about how resources should be, and typically are, distributed, expecting and advocating for equal resource distributions to recipients. Moreover, recent evidence suggests that children may be able to use deviations from equality in resource distributions to make inferences about the nature of social relationships. Here, we investigated whether children use partiality in resource distributions displayed by adults toward children in third-party contexts to identify parent-child relationships, whether children anticipate preferential treatment based upon knowledge of third-party parent-child relationships, and whether children anticipate different emotional reactions to impartiality in resource distributions in parent-child interactions compared to neighbor-child interactions. Four-to seven-year-old children were presented with hypothetical vignettes about an adult character who distributed resources to two children either equally, or systematically favoring one child. By the age of 4, children used resource distribution partiality to identify an adult as a child's parent, and also used these expectations to guide their anticipated emotional reactions to impartiality. By the age of 6, children were also more likely to anticipate partiality to be displayed in parent-child compared to neighbor-child relationships. The findings from the current study reveal that partiality in resource distributions acts as a valuable cue to aid in identifying and understanding social relationships, highlighting the integral role that resources play in children's understanding of their social world. More broadly, our findings support the claim that children use cues that signal interpersonal investment to specify and evaluate parent-child relationships in third-party contexts.

A New Look at Infant Problem-Solving: Using DeepLabCut to Investigate Exploratory Problem-Solving Approaches.

When confronted with novel problems, problem-solvers must decide whether to copy a modeled solution or to explore their own unique solutions. While past work has established that infants can learn to solve problems both through their own exploration and through imitation, little work has explored the factors that influence which of these approaches infants select to solve a given problem. Moreover, past work has treated imitation and exploration as qualitatively distinct, although these two possibilities may exist along a continuum. Here, we apply a program novel to developmental psychology (DeepLabCut) to archival data (Lucca et al., 2020) to investigate the influence of the effort and success of an adult's modeled solution, and infants' firsthand experience with failure, on infants' imitative versus exploratory problem-solving approaches. Our results reveal that tendencies toward exploration are relatively immune to the information from the adult model, but that exploration generally increased in response to firsthand experience with failure. In addition, we found that increases in maximum force and decreases in trying time were associated with greater exploration, and that exploration subsequently predicted problem-solving success on a new iteration of the task. Thus, our results demonstrate that infants increase exploration in response to failure and that exploration may operate in a larger motivational framework with force, trying time, and expectations of task success.

Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals.

Cooperative societies rely on reward and punishment for norm enforcement. We examined the developmental origin of these interventions in the context of distributive fairness: past research has shown that infants expect resources to be distributed fairly, prefer to interact with fair distributors, and evaluate others based on their fair and unfair resource allocations. In order to determine whether infants would intervene in third-party resource distributions by use of reward and punishment we developed a novel task. Sixteen-month-old infants were taught that one side of a touch screen produces reward (vocal statements expressing praise; giving a cookie), whereas the other side produces punishment when touched (vocal statements expressing admonishment; taking away a cookie). After watching videos in which one actor distributed resources fairly and another actor distributed resources unfairly, participants' screen touches on the reward and punishment panels while the fair and unfair distributors appeared on screen were recorded. Infants touched the reward side significantly more than the punishment side when presented with the fair distributor but touched the screen sides equally when the unfair distributor was shown. Control experiments revealed no evidence of reward or punishment when infants saw food items they liked and disliked, or individuals uninvolved in the resource distribution events. These results provide the earliest evidence that infants are able to spontaneously intervene in socio-moral situations by rewarding positive actions.

Infants preferentially help individuals who label objects conventionally.

Recent evidence suggests that infants engage in selective prosocial behavior toward some individuals over others; the ways in which infants are selective can illuminate the origins of prosocial behaviors. Here, we explored selective helping behavior, investigating whether a target recipient's prior adherence to, or defiance of, social conventions affects infants' subsequent likelihood of helping the target individual. 19-month-old infants (N = 120) participated in an interaction with an experimenter who correctly labeled common objects, incorrectly labeled objects, or labeled objects with nonsense English-like labels. Infants' rates of helping were higher when the experimenter adhered to labeling conventions than when she defied labeling conventions by either labeling objects incorrectly or using unfamiliar nonsense labels. The current study provides evidence that infants use information about adhering to conventions to guide their helping behavior. These findings help to document the ways in which infants are selective in their helping behavior as well as possible origins of prosocial obligations toward ingroup members.

Infants rationally decide when and how to deploy effort.

The ability to decide whether, when and how to try is central to human learning. We investigated whether infants can make rational inferences about when and how to try on a novel problem-solving task. After learning from an adult that the task was either easy, difficult or impossible to solve, infants varied in whether, when and how they tried based on the type of social evidence that they received and on their own ongoing experience with the task. Specifically, infants formed expectations about the task, their own ability to solve the task and the experimenter's ability to solve the task, in light of accumulating evidence across time that impacted their time spent trying, trying force, affect, and help-seeking behaviour on the task. Thus, infants flexibly integrate social input and first-hand experience in a dynamic fashion to engage in adaptive persistence.

That's not fair: Children's neural computations of fairness and their impact on resource allocation behaviors and judgments.

The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding of partial inequality has been well documented across middle childhood and is attributed to a host of potential theoretical underpinnings, including developing number concept, increased regard for one's social status, and a maturing concept of fairness. The current study examined the electrophysiological markers associated with children's (N = 83; 4 to 8 years of age) third-party evaluations of equal, slightly unequal, and extremely unequal resource distributions, documenting the timing of fairness considerations. It further explored the link between individual differences in these neural computations and children's allocation behaviors and judgments. Event-related potentials demonstrated an early differentiation between equality and any type of inequality reflected by a medial frontal negativity. Later (after 500 ms), extreme inequality was discriminated from equality and slight inequality. Differences in later waveforms predicted sharing and third-party contextual resource distributions, accounting for wealth and merit. These results illuminate the multifaceted nature of developing neural computations of fairness and illustrate the value of a multiple levels of analysis approach in contributing theoretical clarity toward the developmental science of moral cognition and behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Keep trying!: Parental language predicts infants' persistence.

Infants' persistence in the face of challenges predicts their learning across domains. In older children, linguistic input is an important predictor of persistence: when children are praised for their efforts, as opposed to fixed traits, they try harder on future endeavors. Yet, little is known about the impact of linguistic input as individual differences in persistence are first emerging, during infancy. Based on a preliminary investigation of the CHILDES database, which revealed that language surrounding persistence is an early-emerging feature of children's language environment, we conducted an observational study to test how linguistic input in the form of praise and persistence-focused language more broadly impacts infants' persistence. In Study 1, 18-month-olds and their caregivers participated in two tasks: a free-play task (a gear stacker) and a joint-book reading task. We measured parental language and infants' persistent gear stacking. Findings revealed that infants whose parents spent more time praising their efforts and hard work (process praise), and used more persistence-focused language in general, were more persistent than infants whose parents used this language less often. Study 2 extended these findings by examining whether the effects of parental language on persistence carry over to contexts in which parents are uninvolved. The findings revealed that parental use of process praise predicted infants' persistence even in the absence of parental support. Critically, these findings could not be explained by caregivers' reporting on their own persistence. Together, these findings suggest that as early as 18 months, linguistic input is a key predictor of persistence.

Infants' Understanding of Distributive Fairness as a Test Case for Identifying the Extents and Limits of Infants' Sociomoral Cognition and Behavior.

In this article, I use infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness as a test case to identify the extents and limits of infants' sociomoral cognition and behavior. Infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness is in some ways commensurate with this understanding in older children and adults; infants expect fair distributions of resources and evaluate others based on their adherence to or violation of fairness norms. Yet these sensitivities also differ in important ways, including that infants do not spontaneously punish unfair individuals. I address questions about the role of experience in infants' development of sociomoral cognition and behavior, and whether infants' moral cognition and behavior are differentiated appropriately (from their social knowledge and behavior) and integrated (across subaspects of morality). I suggest two approaches to move the field forward: investigating processes that contribute to developing sociomoral cognition and behavior, and considering infants' successes and failures in this domain.

The Little Engine That Can: Infants' Persistence Matters.

Persistence is central to outcomes across a range of domains: the harder you try, the further you get. Yet relatively little is known about the developmental origins of persistence. Here, we highlight key reasons for a surge of interest in persistence in infancy and early childhood.

Infants' prosocial behavior is governed by cost-benefit analyses.

Cost-benefit analyses are central to mature decision-making and behavior across a range of contexts. Given debates regarding the nature of infants' prosociality, we investigated whether 18-month-old infants' (N = 160) prosocial behavior is impacted by anticipated costs and benefits. Infants participated in a helping task in which they could carry either a heavy or light block across a room to help an experimenter. Infants' helping behavior was attenuated when the anticipated physical costs were high versus low (Experiment 1), and high-cost helping was enhanced under conditions of increased intrinsic motivational benefits (Experiments 2 and 3). High-cost helping was further predicted by infants' months of walking experience, presumably because carrying a heavy block across a room is more effortful for less experienced walkers than for more experienced walkers demonstrating that infants subjectively calibrate costs. Thus, infants' prosocial responding may be guided by a rational decision-making process that weighs and integrates costs and benefits.

The origins of infants' fairness concerns and links to prosocial behavior.

Concerns about fairness are central to mature moral judgments. We review research regarding the origins of a sensitivity to distributive fairness, and how it relates to early sharing. Infants' sensitivity to fairness appears to be commensurate with that of school-age children: infants notice violations to fairness norms and evaluate individuals based on their fair or unfair behavior. However, it may differ in other ways: there is no evidence that infants punish unfair individuals. Sharing behavior plays a role in both the developmental emergence of, and subsequent individual differences in, infants' fairness concerns. These results motivate novel questions, such whether infants can entertain other models of fairness, whether infants' socio-moral concerns hang together, and the relationship early fairness sensitivities and later fair behavior.

Fairness informs social decision making in infancy.

The ability to reason about fairness plays a defining role in the development of morality. Thus, researchers have long been interested in understanding when and how a sensitivity to fairness first develops. Here, we examined infants' ability to use fairness information in selecting social partners. Using a novel experimental paradigm that combined pre-recorded stimuli with an active behavioral measure, we tested whether infants preferred to socially engage with an individual they had previously seen behave fairly or unfairly. After viewing an individual distribute goods to third parties either equally (i.e., 3:3 distribution) or unequally (i.e., 5:1 distribution), both 13- and 17-month-old infants selectively chose to engage in a social interaction with (i.e., take a toy from) an individual who distributed resources equally. The use of a novel paradigm to assess infants' fairness preferences demonstrates that infants' previously established fairness preferences extend across different, more demanding paradigms, and may therefore be more enduring in nature. Together, these findings provide new insights into the nature of infants' fairness representations, and fill in key gaps in the developmental timeline of infants' ability to use fairness information in their consideration of potential social partners. In sum, these findings build on previous research by demonstrating that infants not only hold an expectation that resources should be distributed fairly, they also preferentially interact with those who have previously done so. The early-emerging ability to both reason about and use fairness information may play an influential role in the development of complex prosocial behaviors related to morality more broadly.

The choice is yours: Infants' expectations about an agent's future behavior based on taking and receiving actions.

Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value than similar outcomes that are the result of another person's choices. Across two experiments we test the ontogeny of this phenomenon; that is, whether infants are sensitive to the causal history associated with an agent's acquisition of an object. We demonstrate that on average, 12.5-month-old American infants view taking actions as a better indication of an agent's future behavior than are receiving actions. Furthermore, there were significant individual differences in the extent to which infants perceived object receipt to be indicative of future behavior. Specifically, the less autonomous infants were perceived to be (by their parents), socialized to be, and behaved, the more they viewed object receipt as indicative of future behavior. The results are discussed in terms of the role of individual and cultural experience in early understanding of intentional action. (PsycINFO Database Record

False-belief reasoning from 3 to 92 years of age.

False-belief reasoning, defined as the ability to reason about another person's beliefs and appreciate that beliefs can differ from reality, is an important aspect of perspective taking. We tested 266 individuals, at various ages ranging from 3 to 92 years, on a continuous measure of false-belief reasoning (the Sandbox task). All age groups had difficulty suppressing their own knowledge when estimating what a naïve person knew. After controlling for task-specific memory, our results showed similar false-belief reasoning abilities across the preschool years and from older childhood to younger adulthood, followed by a small reduction in this ability from younger to older adulthood. These results highlight the relative similarity in false-belief reasoning abilities at different developmental periods across the lifespan.

Once a frog-lover, always a frog-lover?: Infants' goal generalization is influenced by the nature of accompanying speech.

The ability to interpret choices as enduring preferences that generalize beyond the immediate situation gives adults a powerful means of predicting and explaining others' behavior. How do infants come to recognize that current choices can be driven by generalizable preferences? Although infants can encode others' actions in terms of goals (Woodward, 1998), there is evidence that 10-month-olds still fail to generalize goal information presented in one environment to an event sequence occurring in a new environment (Sommerville & Crane, 2009). Are there some circumstances in which infants interpret others' goals as generalizable across environments? We investigate whether the vocalizations a person produces while selecting an object in one room influences infants' generalization of the goal to a new room. Ten-month-olds did not spontaneously generalize the actor's goal, but did generalize the actor's goal when the actor initially accompanied her object selection with a statement of preference. Infants' generalization was not driven by the attention-grabbing features of the statement or the mere use of language, as they did not generalize when the actor used matched nonspeech vocalizations or sung speech. Infants interpreted the goal as person-specific, as they did not generalize the choice to a new actor. We suggest that the referential specificity of accompanying speech vocalizations influences infants' tendency to interpret a choice as personal rather than situational. (PsycINFO Database Record