Infants in laboratory settings look longer at impossible than possible events, learn better about objects that behave surprisingly, and match people’s utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms that reveal these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. But less is known about whether these canonical behaviors generalize in naturalistic environments. Here we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings, detailing our methods throughout. In Experiment 1, we found that 15-month-olds (N = 24) looked longer at an online impossible support event (an object appearing to defy gravity) than a possible support event. These infants did not, however, show the same success with an online solidity event. In Experiment 2, we found that 15-month-olds (N = 24) showed surprise-induced learning online—they were better able to learn a label for a novel object when the object had just behaved unexpectedly. Finally, in Experiment 3, we found that 16-month-olds (N = 20) who heard a valenced utterance (“Yum!”) showed preferential looking to the object most likely to have generated that utterance. Together, these results suggest that, with some adjustments, testing infants online is a feasible and promising approach for cognitive development research.
The ability to track and explicitly report another’s beliefs about the world, even when those beliefs conflict with reality, is a milestone that children typically attain between the ages of 3 and 5 years. The majority of work investigating the development of false belief representation has probed children’s ability to track beliefs about tangible entities, such as an object’s location. However, false beliefs are not content specific; they can be about anything that can be represented, including entities that are not directly observable, like others’ emotions. Across two experiments, we tested 3- to 5-year-old children’s ability to track someone else’s false beliefs about an object’s location, versus about an agent’s emotional state (N=160). Our findings reveal parallel developmental progression across the two content types Our findings suggest that young children likely represent false beliefs about any content that they themselves can represent—an ability that emerges over the preschool years.
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