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Csibra & Gergely (1998) proposed that infants take a "teleological stance" when interpreting goal-directed actions; they are sensitive to actions, goals, and physical constraints of an action event, contingent on a principle of rationality. The present experiments tested the plausibility that such a model underlies action prediction that develops into children taking an "intentional stance" (Dennett, 1987), the over-attribution of intentions as a predictive strategy. 3 ½ -4-year-olds were shown animations based on those shown to infants by Gergely et al. (1995). In Experiment 1, children viewed animations of a ball moving in a rational (over rectangle) or non-rational (over nothing) manner, in route to an unambiguous goal (to a triangle) or ambiguous goal (away from a triangle). The objects were then moved, the rectangle taken away, and the child was asked to predict what the ball would do in this new situation. In Experiment 2, the rectangle was included in the test scene in such a way that the child had to choose between the triangle or the rectangle. In Experiment 3, children were given the same animations as Experiment 2, but were given intentional and animacy cues by the Experimenter. There were three dependent measures: Verbal responses, Forced-choice responses (3 locations to choose), and Action Trajectory production (child moves the ball via a touch screen). It was predicted that if children were using the same teleological representation proposed by Csibra & Gergely (1998), then children would verbally reference actions and goals, use intentional language, choose a location consistent with the goal previously viewed, and produce rational (straight-line) trajectories to their predicted location. Moreover, a robust representation was predicted to have high levels of agreement across the three dependent measures. Results indicated nonsystematic patterns of results and little evidence consistent with the predictions of a teleological model. Although children did not show appear to take an "intentional stance" in their language in any of these experiments, there was limited evidence suggesting that those who did attribute intention had higher agreement across measures than those who did not.

This study examined eye movements during video viewing across a wide age range and establishes eye-tracking as a useful tool for studying age differences in processing of video. One-year-olds, 4-year-olds, and adults watched 20 minutes of Sesame Street, a program produced for young children. Results suggest that while the underlying mechanisms controlling eye movements during video viewing are relatively stable across these age groups, particular patterns of eye movements differed in important ways. Specifically, infants' fixations were more variable and less responsive to content boundaries than were those of older children and adults. Results have implications for the extent to which very young children comprehend and can learn from video.

In the current study children 3-5 years of age (N = 75) participated in a mental state task to investigate the effect of action saliency on young children’s appreciation of mental states during pretend play activities. They also engaged in a parent-child interaction period, including storybook reading and pretend play activities, in order to examine the relation between mental state term utterances and performance on the mental state task. Two actors appeared side-by-side on a television screen, either in motion or as static images; one actor had knowledge of the animal he was pretending to be; the other actor did not have the same knowledge. The actors’ behaviors were identical and related to the behavior of the animal, identical and unrelated, or the knowledgeable actor behaved contradictory to the animal’s behavior while the unknowledgeable actor behaved appropriately for that animal. Children were asked to select the actor who was pretending to be the animal. Children selected the appropriate knowledgeable actor significantly more often than a non-knowledgeable actor. Older children performed better than younger children. Children’s performance was unaffected by whether actors were shown in motion as compared to simply a static image. Children performed most successfully on trials where actors were both engaged in behaviors unrelated to the animal’s behavior and poorest when the actor’s behavior was contradictory to his knowledge. The mental state utterances of parents and children were correlated with the children’s performance on the mental state task. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed parent’s mental state utterances used during the parent-child interactions - specifically cognitive terms and modulations of assertion - were predictive of their children’s performance on the mental state task. The current study’s results support an understanding of the mind in pretend play activities by some children younger than five years of age and this understanding may be influenced by their parents’ use of mental state language. Children who do not do well in appreciating that the mind is essential during pretense activities may have difficulty inhibiting responding to action, thus interfering with their ability to maintain focus on the mental state of the pretender.

Emotion regulation refers to processes of modifying emotional reactions and is critical to adaptive functioning. Early childhood is a crucial time to study emotion regulation because of the rapid development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills, yet few studies have systematically examined factors related to emergent emotion regulatory capacities in preschool children. The aims of this project were to explore (1) socio-contextual correlates of emotion regulation in three-year-old children, (2) the extent to which preschoolers can modulate emotional expression on command, and (3) emotion regulation as a protective factor for children’s chronic physiological stress levels. In Study 1 (90 parent-child dyads), I expected that emergent emotion regulation would relate to more supportive home environments and to higher social competence. As hypothesized, children whose parents used more adaptive emotion regulation strategies and who grew up in higher income, less chaotic households had better emotion regulation. Better emergent emotion regulation was associated with better socio-emotional functioning. Study 2 (61 children) explored the capacity of preschool children to intentionally up- and down-regulate emotional expression on command, in order to understand at what point in development they can utilize specific regulatory strategies. When instructed, preschoolers could enhance emotions, but were unable to intentionally suppress emotions. Children who showed fewer spontaneous negative expressions, and were better at enhancing positive expressions, adaptively modulated their emotions when disappointed. Study 3 (86 parent-child dyads) examined the extent to which emotion regulation and reactivity served as protective factors in the context of sociocontextual stressors, buffering children from elevations in chronic physiological stress, as indexed by hair cortisol concentration (HCC). As hypothesized, emotion regulation moderated the relationship between parent and child HCC, suggesting that emotion regulation buffered the transgenerational effects of chronic physiological stress. Finally, children’s negative emotionality moderated the relationship between socioeconomic status and child HCC, indicating that being less emotionally reactive protected preschoolers from increased chronic physiological stress when exposed to sociocontextual risk factors. Together, the results supported the hypotheses that environmental influences contributed to individual differences in emergent emotion regulation and that early in development, emotion regulation was a meaningful index of preschool children’s behavioral and physiological functioning.

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The effect of stimulus variation on the newborn's headturning response was assessed using an habituation-recovery paradigm. Stimuli, differing in content and number of distinct syllables, were presented through off-center loudspeakers to examine the impact of increasing stimulus variability/information on the newborn's auditory attention. Seventy-two neonates were randomly and equally assigned to one of 4 groups: a One Syllable group that heard the same syllabus (e.g., ta-ta); a Three Syllable group that heard three syllables (e.g., pu-pu-ti-ti-ka-ka); a Six Syllable group that heard six syllables (e.g., pi-pi-ta-ta-ku-ku-pa-pa-tu-tu-ki-ki); and a Nine Syllable group that heard nine different syllables (e.g., pi-pi-ta-ta-ku-ku-pa-pa-tu-tu-ki-ki-pu-pu-ti-ti-ka-ka). The duplicated syllables were presented at a rate of 1/sec from either a left or right speaker for 20 trials, with a trial duration of 18 seconds. Following twenty habituation trials, all infants received five trials of a rattle stimulus. The frequency of correct headturns toward the direction of the sound source served as the dependent variable. Analyses revealed that all infants habituated headturning across syllable trials and recovered their responding to the rattle trials. Examination of initial headturning behavior, however, revealed that infants in the Three Syllable group oriented significantly more toward the stimulus (89% of the trials), in comparison to the One Syllable (74%) and Nine Syllable (72%) groups, respectively, suggesting that the moderately varying stimulus was most successful in recruiting attention. The Six Syllable group, with an initial frequency of 80% of headturns toward the sound, did not differ significantly from any other group, although the stimulus' efficacy in recruiting attention measured half-way between the minimal efficacy of the one- and nine-syllable stimuli and the maximum efficacy of the three syllable stimulus. No group differences were found in the stimuli's efficacy in maintaining attention across trials, in that infants in all groups habituated headturning at comparable levels. In sum, these findings imply that moderately varying stimuli are most successful in initially recruiting attention, while highly varying stimuli or nonvarying stimuli are less efficacious. However, following this initial difference, the level of the stimulus variation did not influence infants' subsequent behavior across habituation trials.

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