Journal of experimental child psychology
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Over the second and third years of life, toddlers begin to engage in helping even when it comes at a personal cost. During this same period, toddlers gain experience of ownership, which may influence their tendency to help at a cost. Whereas costly helping has been studied in Western children, who have ample access to resources, the emergence of costly helping has not been examined in societies where children's experience with ownership is varied and access to resources is scarce. ⋯ In the Costly condition, in Canada children's tendency to help increased with age, in Peru children's helping remained stable across age, and in India children's level of helping decreased with age. Thus, whereas we replicate the findings that non-costly helping appears to develop synchronously across diverse societies, costly helping may depend on children's early society-specific experiences. We discuss these findings in relation to children's early ownership experience and access to resources, factors that may account for the divergent patterns in the development of costly helping across these societies.
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J Exp Child Psychol · Jan 2019
Early developing syntactic knowledge influences sequential statistical learning in infancy.
Adults' linguistic background influences their sequential statistical learning of an artificial language characterized by conflicting forward-going and backward-going transitional probabilities. English-speaking adults favor backward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with the head-initial structure of English. Korean-speaking adults favor forward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with the head-final structure of Korean. ⋯ By 13 months, however, English-learning infants favored backward-going transitional probabilities over forward-going transitional probabilities, consistent with English-speaking adults. This indicates that statistical learning rapidly adapts to the predominant syntactic structure of the native language. Such adaptation may facilitate subsequent learning by highlighting statistical structures that are likely to be informative in the native linguistic environment.
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J Exp Child Psychol · Jan 2019
Inhibition of the whole number bias in decimal number comparison: A developmental negative priming study.
A major source of errors in decimal magnitude comparison tasks is the inappropriate application of whole number rules. Specifically, when comparing the magnitude of decimal numbers and the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.9 vs. 0.476), using a property of whole numbers such as "the greater the number of digits, the greater its magnitude" may lead to erroneous answers. ⋯ We found that after participants needed to compare decimal numbers in which the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.9 vs. 0.476), they were less efficient at comparing decimal numbers in which the largest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.826 vs. 0.3) than they were after comparing decimal numbers with the same number of digits after the decimal point (e.g., 0.981 vs. 0.444). The negative priming effects reported in seventh graders and adults suggest that inhibitory control is needed at all ages to avoid errors when comparing decimals where the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point.
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J Exp Child Psychol · Sep 2018
Costs of helping only influence children's intention to help ethnic out-group peers.
Studies show that children are often inclined to help less when the costs of helping increase. However, these studies do not take into account who children are helping. Yet, developmental intergroup research has shown that the intergroup context influences children's reasoning about helping behavior. ⋯ Study 2 (N = 166) replicated the results of Study 1 for a different ethnic out-group context. Moreover, children's reduced willingness to help ethnic out-group peers when costs increase was not contingent on their ethnic in-group or out-group evaluation or their age. Taken together, this research shows, for the first time, that the costs of helping reduce children's willingness to help ethnic out-group peers but not ethnic in-group peers.
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J Exp Child Psychol · Jul 2018
Two facets of patience in young children: Waiting with and without an explicit reward.
Patience, or the ability to tolerate delay, is typically studied using delay of gratification (DoG) tasks. However, among other factors (e.g., type of reward), the use of a reward to test patience is affected by an individual's motivation to obtain the reward (e.g., degree of preference for the small vs. large reward). ⋯ Significant correlations were found between DoG performance and patient behaviors in the pure waiting paradigm, especially when controlling for motivation. These results and methodology show for the first time a direct link between patience as a virtue and DoG performance and also provide new insights about the study of patience in children.