Two studies with 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds (N = 104) examined whether young children can differentiate expertise in the minds of others. Study 1 revealed that all children in the sample could correctly attribute observable knowledge to familiar experts (i.e., a doctor and a car mechanic). Further, 4- and 5-year-olds could correctly attribute knowledge of underlying scientific principles to the appropriate experts. In contrast, Study 2 demonstrated that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds have difficulty making attributions of knowledge of scientific principles to unfamiliar experts. A computational analysis in Study 3 indicated that 4- and 5-year-olds' successes on the first two studies could not be attributed to the way in which words co-occur in discourse. Overall, these studies showed that young children have a sense of the division of cognitive labor, albeit fragile.

This paper investigates the ability of infants to attend to continuous stimulus variables and how this capacity relates to the representation of number. We examined the change in area needed by 6-month-old infants to detect a difference in the size of a single element (Elmo face). Infants successfully discriminated a 1:4, 1:3 and 1:2 change in the area of the Elmo face but failed to discriminate a 2:3 change. In addition, the novelty preference was linearly related to the ratio difference between the novel and familiar area. Results suggest that Weber's Law holds for area discriminations in infancy and also reveal that at 6 months of age infants are equally sensitive to number, time and area.

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This study examined whether books that are typically read to preschool children contain theory of mind concepts. The parents of 47 preschool children recorded books read by or to their child over a one-week period. The books were analyzed for theory of mind content. It was found that 78% of the books contained internal state language, 34% contained false beliefs, and 43% contained personality descriptors. Thus, theory of mind concepts appear to be an integral part of the literature read to preschool children. These results are discussed in light of recent work on individual differences in theory of mind development. Bruner (1990) argued that people use narrative as the basic form of human meaning-making and understanding; that is, people use narratives to explain or make sense of the actions of those around them. Bruner claimed that, in these narratives, people make sense of events by appealing to the subjective states of the participants, such as their hopes, desires, beliefs, feelings, etc. In other words, people use a folk psychology or theory of mind in a narrative form to understand others. Furthermore, Bruner proposed that "while we have an 'innate' and primitive predisposition to narrative organization . . . the culture soon equips us with new powers of narration through its tool kit and through the traditions of telling and interpreting in which we soon come to participate" (Bruner, 1990, p. 80).If the narrative form is basic to human meaning-making and if mental state ascription is essentially a part of that, we might expect that the narratives a culture provides its children would be richly endowed in culturally relevant instances that feature mental and emotional referents and explanations. One major source of these narratives for children is children's literature. Narratives read to children may provide important "training" for children in the task of understanding others' behaviors through the ascription of mental states. Therefore, it seems important to investigate systematically the nature of the narratives