Paul L. Harris

Young children's spontaneous production of mental state utterances involving want , know , and think differed markedly depending on the target of the utterance. Whereas children's affirmations and denials mostly pertained to their own mental states rather than those of others, their questions mostly pertained to the mental states of others rather than their own. This asymmetry was evident for all three mental state verbs, and among both English‐speaking and Mandarin‐speaking children. By implication, children enjoy some form of special access to their own mental states but presume no such special access to the mental states of other people.

Infants' early pointing gestures predict their language development. One hypothesized mechanism for this relation is that pointing elicits caregivers' responses that facilitate word learning. This contingent‐response hypothesis presupposes that adults can accurately interpret the communicative intent underlying infants' points, yet this has not been directly tested. Across three experiments, we examined whether adults can reliably distinguish among five pointing intent categories established in prior research, namely requestive, expressive declarative, spontaneous informative declarative, elicited informative declarative, and interrogative. In Experiment 1, 58 students interpreted infant pointing gestures in 28 video clips, identifying the most prototypical exemplars of each intent. In Experiments 2 and 3, 76 students, 53 U.S. parents, and 38 German parents rated their confidence in each intent for these 5 prototypical clips and reported how they would respond. Across all samples, participants assigned significantly higher confidence to the target intent than to alternatives and reported intent‐differentiated responses. We found few differences between students and parents or between American and German parents, suggesting that interpretation of prototypical pointing gestures is not strongly dependent on child‐rearing experience or cultural background, though comparisons were limited to two Western societies. These findings establish a key precondition for the contingent‐response hypothesis: adults possess the interpretive capacity to provide intent‐appropriate input in response to infant pointing.

People must sometimes choose between seeking accurate beliefs and upholding partisan beliefs. How do people evaluate individuals who diverge from an inaccurate ingroup consensus in their pursuit of truth? To answer this question, we conducted two preregistered studies with adults and 6- to 9-year-old children from the United States (N = 632). Participants evaluated information-seeking, belief change, belief stasis, and outgroup belief endorsement in scenarios involving conflicting intergroup ideologies, in which adopting a new belief entailed a departure from an ingrained belief held by fellow group members. Both adults and children praised others for pursuing the truth through information-seeking and belief revision and for telling others that an evidence-based outgroup belief is correct. However, these positive evaluations were less pronounced for real-world, politically divisive issues in which participants' own political group's beliefs were at stake (Study 1), as compared to hypothetical situations involving fictional groups and novel beliefs (Study 2). Overall, these results indicate that people think it is generally desirable for others to pursue accuracy even at the cost of group loyalty, and this is true by the age of 6. Thus, the formation and retention of unsupported partisan beliefs may frequently be misaligned with the epistemic values that people reflectively endorse. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This research with two studies examined whether young children's moral judgments of honesty and dishonesty predict their actual cheating behavior. Participants were 200 children aged 3–6 years (2021–2022. Study 1: N = 80, Mage = 4.96, 40 girls; Study 2: N = 120, Mage = 4.98, 60 girls; all middle-class Han Chinese). Children completed a temptation resistance paradigm assessing honest or cheating behaviors. They also made moral judgments about story characters who cheated or acted honestly on school tests. Results showed that the more negatively children judged cheating, the less likely they were to cheat. This finding indicates a knowledge–behavior link regarding cheating behavior. It underscores the importance of studying the connection between moral cognition and action in early childhood.

Do children infer other’s emotions from situational information, and do they revise their inferences when provided with additional information about the broader temporal context? We invited 333 children ( M _age = 72.67 months, range = 47–99 months, 56% girls, 44% boys) to look at pictures of a child protagonist seated next to a set of toys—first in the company of another child and then alone. The protagonist’s facial expression was never visible in either picture. Instead, for each picture, the experimenter provided children with an initial description of the immediate situation facing the protagonist before they asked children to (1) attribute an emotion to the protagonist; (2) express their confidence in this attribution; and (3) justify their attribution. The experimenter then claimed to remember more information about the context surrounding each situation before repeating the three questions. Irrespective of age, children shifted markedly in their attributions based on the additional information provided, although older children were more confident in their attributions than younger children and provided more contextual references when justifying their beliefs. Thus, from an early age, children realize that the emotional implications of a situation are not fixed but can shift and even reverse depending on the broader temporal context.

Studies of young children's communication with adults and of their engagement in make-believe play have typically been conducted in parallel, with little dialogue between the two research programs. This review seeks to underline close connections between children's communication with adults and the emergence of the imagination, especially among 2- and 3-year-olds. Young children's ability to imagine currently uncertain possibilities shapes the information-seeking questions that they put to other people. Their ability to imagine as-yet unrealized but desirable possibilities shapes the requests that they make of other people. In each case, children appraise the responses that they receive. In the absence of answers that resolve their information-seeking questions, they repeat their questions. In the absence of compliance with their requests, they repeat their requests. By implication, from an early age, children seek information and help from other people with as-yet unknown or unrealized possibilities in mind.

Children and adults express greater confidence in the existence of invisible scientific as compared to invisible religious entities. To further examine this differential confidence, 5- to 11-year-old Turkish children and their parents (N = 174, 122 females) from various regions in Türkiye, a country with an ongoing tension between secularism and religion, were tested in 2021 for their belief in invisible entities. Participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific than religious entities. For scientific entities, children justified their belief primarily by elaborating on the properties of the entity, rather than referring to the testimonial source of their judgment. This pattern was reversed for religious entities, arguably, highlighting the role of polarization in shaping the testimony children typically hear.

An insight is a moment of sudden understanding followed by characteristic feelings of suddenness, positive affect, certainty, and ease, commonly known as an aha-experience. Despite evidence from studies with adults that aha-experiences benefit learning, little systematic research on children’s aha-experiences exists. The current study asks how children understand and experience insight. We presented a community sample of 160 children (age: 4-8 years, 47% girls, 51% boys, 2 % non-binary) with an illustrated clues task inspired by the Remote Associate Test, a task commonly used to study insight in adults. In this task, children saw three clues and were asked to find a solution word that was associated with the three clues. Self-reported and observed aha-experiences were recorded, along with children’s solution accuracy and confidence. Children also answered a set of questions to assess their understanding of aha-experiences. We found that although the number of aha-experiences remained stable across age, there was a clear developmental increase in the understanding of aha-experiences. Children’s ability to recognize their own aha-experiences as well as their general understanding of the aha-concept increased with age. This suggests a lag between the occurrence of children’s aha-experiences and their understanding of such experiences; children first have aha-experiences and later develop an understanding of those experiences. Aha-experiences were associated with higher accuracy, but not with higher confidence ratings. Observed aha-experiences, but not self-reported aha-experiences, predicted increased motivation. Our findings are in line with the literature on metacognitive development, and the distinction between the experience and the understanding of emotion.