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Eighteen-month-olds infants are aroused and concerned by moral transgressions

Our study, accepted for publication in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), found that human infants are physiologically aroused (measured by changes in pupil size) and empathically concerned (measured by expressive behaviors) when observing someone who destroys another person’s picture which would make the owner sad. Importantly, infants did not show such enhanced physiological or empathic reactions when witnessing a harmless violation (i.e.,…

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Young children use imitation communicatively

In a recent study published in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology our postdoc Nazlı Altınok and her colleagues tested whether children expend extra effort to ensure that the demonstrator sees their imitation. In one condition, the demonstrator did not have visual access to the children's actions because a barrier blocked her view. In another condition, the center of the barrier was removed so that the demonstrator had uninterrupted visual access to the children's behavior. Children as…

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Closeness-communication bias: Children overestimate which information their caregivers share

It is helpful to understand what the people we interact with know. For example, if I understand that my friend already knows my address, I can simply ask her to come to “my house” rather than having to list my full address each time I invite her over. However, sometimes we predict that the people close to us share more knowledge with us than they actually do – a phenomenon called the closeness-communication bias. Here, I might mistakenly assume that my friend still knows my address, even though…

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