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Much recent research has shown that children from age 4 onwards reveal a robust preference for reliable over unreliable informants when choosing whom to trust and learn from. Findings concerning selective model choice in children younger than 4 years have mostly been mixed. The present study developed a new touchscreen‐based paradigm with reduced task demands in order to test 2‐ and 3‐year‐old children (N = 48). Results showed that 3‐year‐olds selectively endorsed information from a previously reliable rather than a previously unreliable informant when searching for objects whereas 2‐ year‐olds just followed the first hint even if provided by an unreliable informant. Whether the lack of selective model choice in 2‐year‐olds reflects competence or performance deficits remains to be clarified. But the present results do suggest that 3‐years‐olds have the basic competence to selectively choose reliable over unreliable informants that may have been masked in some previous studies by task demands. Highlights • The paper develops a novel touchscreen‐based search paradigm to test young children's selective trust with reduced task demands. • Three‐year‐olds chose selectively between conflicting hints, whereas 2‐year‐olds followed the first hint even if provided by an unreliable informant.

The current study tested the reliability and generalizability of a narrative act-out false belief task held to reveal Theory of Mind (ToM) competence at 3 years of age, before children pass verbal standard false belief tasks (the “Duplo task”; Rubio-Fernández & Geurts, 2013, Psychological Science). We conducted the task across two labs with methodologically improved matched control conditions. Further, we administered an analogue intensionality version to assess the scope of ToM competence in the Duplo task. 72 3-year-olds participated in a Duplo change-oflocation task, a Duplo intensionality task, and half of them in a matched verbal standard changeof-location task, receiving either false belief or matched true belief scenarios. Children performed at chance in the false belief Duplo location change and intensionality tasks as well as in the standard false belief task. There were no differences to the standard task, and performance correlated across all three false belief tasks, revealing a rather unified competence and no task advantage. In the true belief conditions of both Duplo tasks, children performed at ceiling and significantly different from the false belief conditions, while they were at chance in the true belief condition of the standard task. The latter indicates that a pragmatic advantage of the Duplo task compared to the standard task holds only for the true belief scenarios. Our study shows that the Duplo task measures the same ToM competence as the standard task and rejects a notion of earlier false belief understanding on the group level in 3-year-old children.

From birth on, infants are astonishingly well equipped to get in touch with the social world. Basic forms of social interaction shape the relationships between infants and their caregivers from early on and become continuously more sophisticated throughout the first year of life. By the second year, infants have acquired important developmental milestones of simple (perception-goal) folk psychology and shared intentionality. Around their fourth birthday, children develop a full-blown explicit meta-representational Theory of Mind, an essential foundation for successful social interaction. This standard picture of the development of social interaction has been questioned by research suggesting false-belief competence earlier in infancy. Yet, developments of recent years remind us to be careful in drawing strong conclusions on what infants can and cannot do on relatively thin empirical grounds. As in the case of neonatal imitation (and probably also fetal face preference, see Scheel et al., 2018), recent replication studies challenge the early competence view. Looking to the future, collaborative approaches implementing methodological rigour promise to generate solid knowledge on the development of social cognition and social interaction in infancy.

Traditionally, it had been assumed that meta-representational Theory of Mind (ToM) emerges around the age of 4 when children come to master standard false belief (FB) tasks. More recent research with various implicit measures, though, has documented much earlier competence and thus challenged the traditional picture. In interactive FB tasks, for instance, infants have been shown to track an interlocutor’s false or true belief when interpreting her ambiguous communicative acts (Southgate et al. 2010 Dev. Sci. 13, 907– 912. (doi:10.1111/j.1467–7687.2009.00946.x)). However, several replication attempts so far have produced mixed findings (e.g. Dörrenberg et al. 2018 Cogn. Dev. 46, 12–30. (doi:10. 1016/j.cogdev.2018.01.001); Grosse Wiesmann et al. 2017 Dev. Sci. 20, e12445. (doi:10.1111/desc.12445); Király et al. 2018 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 115, 11 477–11 482. (doi:10.1073/ pnas.1803505115)). Therefore, we conducted a systematic replication study, across two laboratories, of an influential interactive FB task (the so-called ‘Sefo’ tasks by Southgate et al. 2010 Dev. Sci. 13, 907–912. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009. 00946.x)). First, we implemented close direct replications with the original age group (17-month-olds) and compared their performance to those of 3-year-olds. Second, we designed conceptual replications with modifications and improvements regarding pragmatic ambiguities for 2-year-olds. Third, we validated the task with explicit verbal test versions in older children and adults. Results revealed the following: the original results could not be replicated, and there was no evidence for FB understanding measured by the Sefo task in any age group except for adults. Comparisons to explicit FB tasks suggest that the Sefo task may not be a sensitive measure of FB understanding in children and even underestimate their ToM abilities. The findings add to the growing replication crisis in implicit ToM research and highlight the challenge of developing sensitive, reliable and valid measures of early implicit social cognition.

Young children learn selectively from others based on the speakers’ prior accuracy. This indicates that they recognize the models’ (in)competence and use it to predict who will provide the most accurate and useful information in the future. Here, we investigated whether 5-year-old children are also able to use speaker reliability retrospectively, once they have more information regarding their competence. They first experienced two previously unknown speakers who provided conflicting information about the referent of a novel label, with each speaker using the same novel label to refer exclusively to a different novel object. Following this, children learned about the speakers’ differing labelling accuracy. Subsequently, children selectively endorsed the object–label link initially provided by the speaker who turned out to be reliable significantly above chance. Crucially, more than half of these children justified their object selection with reference to speaker reliability, indicating the ability to explicitly reason about their selective trust in others based on the informants’ individual competences. Findings further corroborate the notion that young children are able to use advanced, metacognitive strategies (trait reasoning) to learn selectively. By contrast, since learning preceded reliability exposure and gaze data showed no preferential looking toward the more reliable speaker, findings cannot be accounted for by attentional bias accounts of selective social learning.

The natural history of our moral stance told here in this commentary reveals the close nexus of morality and basic socialcognitive capacities. Big mysteries about morality thus transform into smaller and more manageable ones. Here, I raise questions regarding the conceptual, ontogenetic, and evolutionary relations of the moral stance to the intentional and group stances and to shared intentionality.

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4. The standard interpretation of this finding is that children at this age have acquired a solid capacity for meta-representation. New research with true belief (TB) control tasks, however, presents a puzzling phenomenon: While 3-year-olds pass these tasks but fail FB tasks, children from age 4 begin to show the reverse performance (passing FB but failing TB). Competence deficit accounts claim that these findings jeopardize the standard interpretation; they show that children may use simple heuristics rather than true meta-representation and that the original FB findings may thus have been false positives. Pragmatic performance limitation accounts, in contrast, claim that these findings do not document any conceptual limitations, but merely reflect children’s confusion in light of the task pragmatics. In the present study, the two accounts were tested against each other in seven experiments with 4- to 7-yearold children. Pragmatic tasks factors of TB tests were systematically modified. Results show that children’s difficulty with TB tasks indeed disappeared after some such modifications. This clearly speaks against competence limitation accounts and corroborates the standard interpretation of FB and related Theory of Mind tasks.

Most statistical problems encountered throughout life require the ability to quantify probabilities based on proportions. Recent findings on the early ontogeny of this ability have been mixed: For example, when presented with jars containing preferred and less preferred items, 12-month-olds, but not 3- and 4-years-olds, seem to rely on the proportions of objects in the jars to predict the content of samples randomly drawn out of them. Given these contrasting findings, it remains unclear what the probabilistic reasoning abilities of young children are and how they develop. In our study, we addressed this question and tested, with identical methods across age groups and similar methods to previous studies, whether 12-month-olds and 3- and 4-years-olds rely on proportions of objects to estimate probabilities of random sampling events. Results revealed that neither infants nor preschoolers do. While preschoolers’ performance is in line with previous findings, infants’ performance is difficult to interpret given their failure in a control condition in which the outcomes happened with certainty rather than a graded probability. More systematic studies are needed to explain why infants succeeded in a previous study but failed in our study.

Caregivers typically use an exaggerated speech register known as infant-directed speech (IDS) in communication with infants. Infants prefer IDS over adult-directed speech (ADS) and IDS is functionally relevant in infant-directed communication. We examined interactions among maternal IDS quality, infants’ preference for IDS over ADS, and the functional relevance of IDS at 6 and 13 months. While 6-month-olds showed a preference for IDS over ADS, 13-month-olds did not. Differences in gaze following behavior triggered by speech register (IDS vs. ADS) were found in both age groups. The degree of infants’ preference for IDS (relative to ADS) was linked to the quality of maternal IDS infants were exposed to. No such relationship was found between gaze following behavior and maternal IDS quality and infants’ IDS preference. The results speak to a dynamic interaction between infants’ preference for different kinds of social signals and the social cues available to them.

Recent research has shown that from early in development, children selectively form new beliefs in response to information supplied by others. However, little is known about the development of selective revision of existing beliefs in response to socially conveyed information. Such selective social belief revision has been extensively studied by social psychologists in the context of advice-taking. Here, we adapted the methods of this research tradition for studying selective advice-taking in young children and adults. Participants solved a perceptual judgment task, received advice, and subsequently made final decisions. The informational access (perceptual quality) of participants and advisor were experimentally manipulated. Adults revised their judgments systematically as a function of both their own and the advisor’s informational access whereas children based their adjustments only on their own informational access. Two follow-up experiments suggest, however, that this pattern of results in children reflected performance rather than competence limitations: In suitably modified tasks, children did proficiently consider both their own informational situation and that of the advisor in their selective social belief revision.

It has been suggested that due to functional similarity, sortal object individuation might be a primordial form of psychological essentialism. For example, the relative independence of identity judgment from perceived surface features is a characteristic of essentialist reasoning. Also, infants engaging in sortal object individuation pay more attention to kind than surface feature information when judging the identity of objects (e.g.). Indeed, previous research found that 14-month-old infants can judge trans-temporal identity even in complete absence of kind-specific surface features. Here, we used another more demanding non-linguistic paradigm to test the limits of these abilities in 14-, 18-, 23- and 36-monthold infants, comparing their performance to recent great ape data. Particularly, we presented infants with two food kinds, whose surface features were then fully transformed to make them look identical. If reasoning according to essentialist principles, participants should select the preferred item despite superficial manipulations. However, only 36- month-olds reliably tracked the preferred item after superficial manipulations. This suggests that, although basic psychological essentialism may emerge early in infancy, more complex forms require domain-general cognitive prerequisites, which only develop in more protracted form.

Predicting others’ behavior is critical for everyday social interactions. Research indicates a development in the cues children rely on in making such predictions. The present studies investigated whether 5- and 8-year-olds from Germany and Israel (N = 136) rely on group preferences for predicting others’ behavior, and whether their reliance on group preferences vary for in- and outgroups. Children were asked to predict the behavior of in- and outgroup members, while presented with conflicting information about a group’s and an individual’s preference. The main finding was that in both Germany and Israel, children – especially 8-year-olds – systematically predicted that novel group members would follow a group preference, but that an individual would maintain his/her own preference. Moreover, in neither country were children affected by the group membership of the target individuals. These studies reveal the protracted development of children’s capacity to negotiate multiple sources of information for predicting people’s behaviors.

When and how do children develop an understanding of the subjectivity of intentions? Intentions are subjective mental states in many ways. One way concerns their aspectuality: Whether or not a given behavior constitutes an intentional action depends on how, under which aspect, the agent represents it. Oedipus, for example, intended to marry Yocasta, but did not intend to marry his mother (even though in fact, but unbeknownst to him, Yocasta was his mother). In the present study, we investigated the trajectories and determinants of children’s developing understanding of (less dramatic forms of) the aspectuality of intentions. In two studies, children aged 3–9 observed an agent who acted intentionally but based on some mis-representation regarding the target of her action. The agent grasped a box that contained A and B while believing that it only contained A but not B. Children were asked about the aspectuality of the agent’s intention (in particular, whether she intended to grasp B). When asked to do so spontaneously, children younger than 8 failed (falsely claiming that the agent intended to grasp B). In contrast, in a simplified format in which children were scaffolded through the required inferential chains, children from age 6 succeeded. Children’s general capacity for meta-representation appeared to be necessary but not sufficient by itself for understanding the aspectuality of intentions. The present findings suggest that the appreciation of the aspectuality of intentions is part of an advanced theory of mind that develops in much more protracted ways than basic theory of mind.

When dogs interact with humans, they often show appropriate reactions to human intentional action. But it is unclear from these everyday observations whether the dogs simply respond to the action outcomes or whether they are able to discriminate between diferent categories of actions. Are dogs able to distinguish intentional human actions from unintentional ones, even when the action outcomes are the same? We tested dogs’ ability to discriminate these action categories by adapting the so-called “Unwilling vs. Unable” paradigm. This paradigm compares subjects’ reactions to intentional and unintentional human behaviour. All dogs received three conditions: In the unwillingcondition, an experimenter intentionally withheld a reward from them. In the two unable-conditions, she unintentionally withheld the reward, either because she was clumsy or because she was physically prevented from giving the reward to the dog. Dogs clearly distinguished in their spontaneous behaviour between unwilling- and unable-conditions. This indicates that dogs indeed distinguish intentional actions from unintentional behaviour. We critically discuss our fndings with regard to dogs’ understanding of human intentional action.

Recently, online testing has become an increasingly important instrument in developmental research, in particular since the COVID-19 pandemic made in-lab testing impossible. However, online testing comes with two substantial challenges. First, it is unclear how valid results of online studies really are. Second, implementing online studies can be costly and/or require profound coding skills. This article addresses the validity of an online testing approach that is low-cost and easy to implement: The experimenter shares test materials such as videos or presentations via video chat and interactively moderates the test session. To validate this approach, we compared children’s performance on a well-established task, the change-of-location false belief task, in an in-lab and online test setting. In two studies, 3- and 4-year-old received online implementations of the false belief version (Study 1) and the false and true belief version of the task (Study 2). Children’s performance in these online studies was compared to data of matching tasks collected in the context of in-lab studies. Results revealed that the typical developmental pattern of performance in these tasks found in in-lab studies could be replicated with the novel online test procedure. These results suggest that the proposed method, which is both low-cost and easy to implement, provides a valid alternative to classical in-person test settings.

What do young children understand about arguments? Do they evaluate arguments critically when deciding whom to learn from? To address this question, we investigated children at age 4–5, when robust selective social learning is in place. In Studies 1a/b, children made an initial perceptual judgment regarding the location of an object under varying perceptual circumstances; then received advice by another informant who had better/worse perceptual access than them; and then made their final judgment. The advice by the other informant was sometimes accompanied by utterances of the form “I am certain . . . because I’ve seen it”. These utterances thus constituted good arguments in some conditions (informant could see clearly), but not in others (informant had poor perceptual access). Results showed that children evaluated argument quality in context-sensitive ways and used them differentially for belief-revision. They engaged in more belief-revision when the informant gave this argument only when her perceptual condition, and thus her argument, was good. In Study 2, children were asked to find out about different properties (color/texture) of an object, and received conflicting testimony from two informants who supported their claims by utterances of the form “because I’ve seen it” (good argument regarding color/poor regarding texture) or “because I’ve felt it” (vice versa). Again, children engaged in context-relative evaluation of argument quality, selectively learning from the agent with the appropriate argument. Taken together, these finding reveal that children from age 4 understand argument quality in sophisticated, context-relative ways, and use this understanding for selective learning and belief-revision.

A long-standing dispute in theory of mind research concerns the development of understanding different kinds of propositional attitudes. The asymmetry view suggests that children understand conative attitudes (e.g., desires) before they understand cognitive attitudes (e.g., beliefs). The symmetry view suggests that notions of cognitive and conative attitudes develop simultaneously. Relevant studies to date have produced inconsistent results, yet with different methods and dependent measures. To test between the two accounts more systematically, we thus combined different forms of desire tasks (incompatible desires and competition) with different forms of measurement (verbal ascription and active choice) in a single design. Additionally, children’s performance in the desire tasks was compared to their false-belief understanding. Results revealed that 3-year-olds were better at ascribing desires than at ascribing beliefs for both desire tasks whereas they had difficulties actively choosing the more desired option in the competition task. The present findings thus favor the asymmetry theory.

Adults manifest a number of attributional biases in explaining the behavior of in- versus out-group members. The present study investigated the developmental origins of such biased explanation. Children from majority and minority populations in Israel, and from majority populations in Germany (N = 165), were asked to explain the behavior of inand out-group members. Across ages and groups, children more often referred to group membership when explaining an out-group as compared to an in-group member’s behavior; and more often to individual factors when explaining an in-group as compared to an out-group member’s behavior. These findings are consistent with the early emergence of fundamental differences in the conceptualizations of in- and out-group members.