While much research has focused on understanding the process by which young children learn to count, little work has explored the effects of direct instruction on this process. In the current study, we explored the impacts of training children in an explicit counting procedure on two distinct cardinality tasks. Two- to 5-year-old children first participated in a Give-N task in which counting proficiency was assessed, and then participated in a short instruction session where explicit counting was modeled and encouraged. Following training, children were significantly better at identifying which of two cards contained a set size outside of their range of counting mastery (Huang, Spelke, & Snedeker, 2010) and were more likely to improve on a secondary numerical production task (Give-N; Wynn, 1990, 1992) compared with children in the control group. Not surprisingly, a greater proportion of children in the count training condition overtly counted during the cardinality task, a strategy that was found to be the strongest indicator of performance. Together, results reveal that even 5 min of counting instruction greatly increases the likelihood that a child will engage in counting behavior and results in improvements in cardinality judgments in two distinct numerical tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Young children spontaneously share resources with anonymous recipients, but little is known about the specific circumstances that promote or hinder these prosocial tendencies. Children (ages 3–11) received a small (12) or large (30) number of stickers, and were then given the opportunity to share their windfall with either one or multiple anonymous recipients (Dictator Game). Whether a child chose to share or not varied as a function of age, but was uninfluenced by numerical context. Moreover, children’s giving was consistent with a proportion-based account, such that children typically donated a similar proportion (but different absolute number) of the resources given to them, regardless of whether they originally received a small or large windfall. The proportion of resources donated, however, did vary based on the number of recipients with whom they were allowed to share, such that on average, children shared more when there were more recipients available, particularly when they had more resources, suggesting they take others into consideration when making prosocial decisions. Finally, results indicated that a child’s gender also predicted sharing behavior, with males generally sharing more resources than females. Together, findings suggest that the numerical contexts under which children are asked to share, as well as the quantity of resources that they have to share, may interact to promote (or hinder) altruistic behaviors throughout childhood.

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