We argue that the core social being system is unlike other core systems in that it participates in frequent, widespread learning. As a result, the social being system is less constant throughout the lifespan and less informationally encapsulated than other core systems. This learning supports the development of the precursors of bias, but also provides avenues for preempting it.

Optimism is linked to persistence and resilience in adults; however, how optimism might relate to children's evaluations of potentially challenging situations and risk-taking behaviors is unknown. This study examined the role of optimism in 4- to 8-year-old children's (N = 121) perceptions of and willingness to engage in physical activities that ranged from low to high risk. Overall, children perceived activities with more risky elements as more dangerous and were less willing to try them, with this pattern strongest in older children. Moreover, children higher in optimism were (1) more willing to engage in moderate-risk activities relative to children lower in optimism, but (2) less willing to engage in the highest-risk activities-even though they perceived those highest-risk activities as less dangerous than children lower in optimism. These findings support the possibility that optimism motivates children to engage in beneficial moderately challenging activities and protects them from engaging in severe injury-inflicting activities.

The current study examined whether racially minoritized children and racial majority children demonstrate different race-based learning preferences and whether the racial demographics of their schools and neighborhoods predict these preferences. Race-based information endorsement and teacher preferences of Black and White 3- to 7-year-old children (n = 238) recruited from a metropolitan area in the midwestern United States were examined. Across racially homogeneous and diverse schools, both Black and White children showed a White preference in information endorsement and teacher preference. Black and White children did not differ in their information endorsement, but they did differ in their teacher preferences: Black children chose Black teachers more than White children. Further, children overall chose the accurate adult as their teacher regardless of the adult's race, but the racial demographics of children's schools and neighborhoods related to these responses: Three-year-old children were more likely to select the accurate Black adult over the inaccurate White adult if there were more Black teachers in their schools and larger Black populations in their neighborhoods. Exploratory analyses indicated that 5- to 7-year-old White children who had non-White classroom teachers chose Black adults more than those who had White classroom teachers, but classroom teacher's race did not relate to Black children's teacher preference. The findings suggest that both microlevel factors (e.g., children's classroom teachers) and macrolevel factors (e.g., proportion of Black teachers in children's schools and Black population in their neighborhoods) could influence who children choose to learn from and prefer as teachers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

This study examined how the reliability (i.e., transitivity) of an agent's object choices affects 16-month-old infants' (N = 48) imita-tion of her unconventional way of turning on a touch light box with her head when her hands were available. When the agent made transitive choices (i.e., she chose Object A over Object B, Object B over Object C, and then A over C), infants imitated her head touch actions. When the agent made intransitive choices (i.e., after choosing A over B and B over C, she chose C over A), infants were more likely to use only their hands to touch the light box. In addi-tion, when it was presumably difficult for infants to judge the tran-sitivity of the agent's choices (i.e., she chose B over C, A over B, and then A over C), they used their hands more. These results demon-strate that infants' understanding informs their decisions to selec-tively imitate others' specific ways to act on novel artifacts, consistent with young children's selective trust in information pro-vided by other people based on their epistemic reliability.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Pre-diagnostic deficits in social motivation are hypothesized to contribute to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a heritable neurodevelopmental condition. We evaluated psychometric properties of a social motivation index (SMI) using parent-report item-level data from 597 participants in a prospective cohort of infant siblings at high and low familial risk for ASD. We tested whether lower SMI scores at 6, 12, and 24 months were associated with a 24-month ASD diagnosis and whether social motivation’s course differed relative to familial ASD liability. The SMI displayed good internal consistency and temporal stability. Children diagnosed with ASD displayed lower mean SMI T-scores at all ages and a decrease in mean T-scores across age. Lower group-level 6-month scores corresponded with higher familial ASD liability. Among high-risk infants, strong decline in SMI T-scores was associated with 10-fold odds of diagnosis. Infant social motivation is quantifiable by parental report, differentiates children with versus without later ASD by age 6 months, and tracks with familial ASD liability, consistent with a diagnostic and susceptibility marker of ASD. Early decrements and decline in social motivation indicate increased likelihood of ASD, highlighting social motivation’s importance to risk assessment and clarification of the ontogeny of ASD.

Optimism, a bias to overestimate positive and underestimate negative outcomes, may shape how children learn, confront challenges, and overcome setbacks. Although approximately 80% of adults are optimistic, childhood optimism is understudied. A racially and socioeconomically diverse community sample of 152 three- to six-year-old children participated in two experiments (one story-based, one numeric probability-based) that assessed expectations of event outcomes when the likelihood of the outcome occurring either matched or conflicted with the most desirable outcome. The results systematically demonstrate that children are optimistic, even more optimistic for themselves than others, and increasingly integrate probabilistic information into their predictions with age. Differences in optimism were found in children from different socioeconomic backgrounds and those with different levels of depressive symptoms. These findings provide insight into how children reason about the future and elucidate key factors that impact optimistic predictions in childhood.

Individual differences in child eating self-regulation are associated with excess weight gain and may be explained, in part, by the family feeding environment and a child's general propensity to self-regulate outside of the context of eating (i.e., general self-regulation). Several studies have examined the associations between food parenting behaviors, child eating and general self-regulation, and child weight separately. However, there are a paucity of data on whether and how these factors interact to confer risk for weight gain in early childhood. The current systematic review identified 32 longitudinal studies that examined unidirectional or bidirectional associations among one or more of the following paths: food parenting behaviors and child eating self-regulation (path 1); child eating self-regulation and child weight (path 2); child eating self-regulation and child general self-regulation (path 3); food parenting behaviors and child general self-regulation (path 4); and child general self-regulation and child weight (path 5). Results indicated relationships of food parenting behaviors to child eating self-regulation, child weight to child eating self-regulation, and child general self-regulation to child weight. However, there were scant longitudinal data that examined paths 3 and 4. Further research on the developmental correlates of child eating self-regulation is needed to identify parent and child targets for early childhood obesity prevention.

Background:Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder diagnosed based on social impairment, restricted interests, and repetitive behaviors. Contemporary theories posit that cerebellar pathology contributes causally to ASD by disrupting error-based learning (EBL) during infancy. The present study represents the first test of this theory in a prospective infant sample, with potential implications for ASD detection. Methods:Data from the Infant Brain Imaging Study (n = 94, 68 male) were used to examine 6-month cerebellar functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging in relation to later (12/24-month) ASD-associated behaviors and outcomes. Hypothesis-driven univariate analyses and machine learning-based predictive tests examined cerebellar-frontoparietal network (FPN; subserves error signaling in support of EBL) and cerebellar-default mode network (DMN; broadly implicated in ASD) connections. Cerebellar-FPN functional connectivity was used as a proxy for EBL, and cerebellar-DMN functional connectivity provided a comparative foil. Data-driven functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging enrichment examined brain-wide behavioral associations, with post hoc tests of cerebellar connections. Results:Cerebellar-FPN and cerebellar-DMN connections did not demonstrate associations with ASD. Functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging enrichment identified 6-month correlates of later ASD-associated behaviors in networks of a priori interest (FPN, DMN), as well as in cingulo-opercular (also implicated in error signaling) and medial visual networks. Post hoc tests did not suggest a role for cerebellar connections. Conclusions:We failed to identify cerebellar functional connectivity-based contributions to ASD. However, we observed prospective correlates of ASD-associated behaviors in networks that support EBL. Future studies may replicate and extend network-level positive results, and tests of the cerebellum may investigate brain-behavior associations at different developmental stages and/or using different neuroimaging modalities.

Optimists, by definition, make inaccurate (overly positive) predictions regarding future event outcomes. Adults favor optimists as social partners. If children also prefer optimists, that preference could indicate early social benefits of being optimistic and might also shape how and what children learn regarding the likelihood of future outcomes. The present study thus sought to determine how children integrate the conflicting dimensions of optimism and accuracy in their social (friendship) preferences. Across two experiments (N = 133) 3- to 6-year-old children chose optimists over realists as social partners even if they were able to correctly identify the realist as being the most accurate of the two. However, when children made mistakes in identification, those mistakes primarily took the form of identifying the optimist as most accurate. These findings suggest that young children weigh optimism more heavily than accuracy in their affiliative relationships. Misidentifying the optimist as accurate also supports the notion that children have a bias to expect others to provide positive information. Further, a social preference for optimists might impact children's abilities to learn the true likelihood of event outcomes, as affiliating with optimists may result in setting oneself up to receive more positive (mis)information in the future. Such a preference suggests a mechanism by which optimism is perpetuated and points to potential social benefits that derive from being optimistic.

The complex probabilistic properties of specific events determine the number or range of possible outcomes they can produce (i.e., outcome entropy). Do humans use estimates of outcome entropy for real-world events to reason about what is possible? We test whether adults (N=106) and children (N=368) use such estimates to constrain their judgments about outcomes for complex, real-world events including paint mixing and skin-color inheritance. Here we show that adults’ and children’s judgments reflect awareness of outcome entropy, such that fewer outcomes are deemed possible for deterministic events than probabilistic ones. Evidence of this sophisticated capacity appears between four and five years of age. Taken together, the results suggest that outcome entropy is a fundamental and early emerging factor in human reasoning about what is possible.

Children need to build trust in their primary caregivers or significant others, as well as people who are unrelated to them, including those who belong to different social groups. The present chapter focuses on children's trust in unfamiliar individuals. How do they determine who to trust? Does putting trust in another person operate differently depending on the specific issue at hand? To address these questions, we differentiate between two forms of trust: children's trust in others' epistemic states to learn from others (epistemic trust) and trusting others for social support and reassurance (social trust), for example, when to expect that interaction partners will be truthful and keep promises. We first review the literature on epistemic trust to show that young children seem to value others' accuracy and competence when learning from them, even when these individuals are from different linguistic or racial groups than their own. We then present findings on social trust suggesting that young children trust those who are well-meaning and who keep their promises. Finally, we raise the question of whether there are environmental influences on the interaction of both epistemic and social trust with intergroup factors such as race, and we propose that research with infants will be useful to better illuminate the developmental roots of human trust.

Starting in the preschool years, children show socially exclusive behaviors, such as intentionally leaving out another child from a ball game. Prior research investigating social exclusion understanding in preschoolers primarily used interview methods and it is clear that the verbal and cognitive skills necessary to identify and reason about social exclusion become more sophisticated with age. Yet it is unknown how children's ability to identify social exclusion relates to their own behavior, such as their social preference for socially inclusive or exclusive individuals. Further, whether such social preferences remain stable or change across development is an open question. Thus, the current study investigated whether the ability to identify social exclusion develops in tandem with social preference behavior by assessing 3- to 6-year-old children's (N = 256) identification of social exclusion and preferences between socially exclusive and inclusive agents. Five- to six-year-old children correctly identified social exclusion and preferred inclusive agents over exclusive agents across two experiments. Three- to four-year-old children could correctly identify social exclusion, but did not show evidence of a preference for inclusive agents over exclusive agents. Children were also able to detect implicit, nonverbalized social exclusion equally well as explicit, verbalized social exclusion across development. These findings suggest that young children's social preferences are not wholly dictated by their ability to identify socially exclusive agents. This divergent pattern of social preference from identification has implications for interpreting social preference behavior in young children.

When people are rejected by others, they typically feel an immediate sense of pain-referred to as social pain. Social pain is hypothesized to be the alarm response of a "quick and crude" ostracism detection system, a system that is highly sensitive to even minimal signs of exclusion. Physiological reactivity has been found to accompany this social pain, but it is unclear whether the physiological mechanism underlying the ostracism detection system is also "quick and crude." To test whether physiological reactivity to exclusion is "quick and crude," the present study investigated whether pupil dilation (an index of physiological reactivity) differs when detecting exclusion from human entities versus nonhuman entities and when experiencing versus witnessing exclusion using a Cyberball paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that pupil size decreased less when viewing players who were exclusive than those who were inclusive, regardless of whether the players were human (i.e., undergraduate students) or nonhuman (i.e., computerized) entities. The same pupil reactivity pattern was observed in Experiment 2 after participants watched interactions in which another person was included or excluded by human or nonhuman entities. In Experiment 3, participating in real-life interactions with human players did not cause pupil reactivity to be greater to human players compared to nonhuman players, but pupil size again decreased less when viewing exclusive players compared to inclusive players. Across all three experiments, pupil size decreased less when viewing players who were exclusive than inclusive regardless of the social identity of the players. These findings support the idea of a highly sensitive, "quick and crude" physiological mechanism that underlies the ostracism detection system.

Adults segment continuous and dynamic environment into discrete units, and individual differences in segmentation predict individual differences in memory. Similar parsing mechanisms have been identified in infants, using different methods, but little is known about event segmentation in older children or about its relations to memory. We tested event segmentation and its relations to memory in 5- to 7-year-old children and adults. Participants performed two event comprehension tasks with short animated narrative movies: a unitization task, in which they pressed a key to mark boundaries between meaningful events, and a dwell time task, in which they viewed a self-paced slideshow, and completed two memory tasks. Adults outperformed children as expected. For both age groups, better event comprehension was associated with better memory, though which measures showed this relationship varied. Thus, by school age, children have developed event segmentation mechanisms that, like adults, contribute to episodic memory formation.

Two studies explored young children’s understanding of the role of shared language in communication by investigating how monolingual English-speaking children interact with an English speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a bilingual experimenter who spoke both English and Spanish. When the bilingual experimenter spoke in Spanish or English to request objects, four-year-old children, but not three-year-olds, used her language choice to determine whom she addressed (e.g. requests in Spanish were directed to the Spanish speaker). Importantly, children used this cue – language choice – only in a communicative context. The findings suggest that by four years, monolingual children recognize that speaking the same language enables successful communication, even when that language is unfamiliar to them. Three-year-old children’s failure to make this distinction suggests that this capacity likely undergoes significant development in early childhood, although other capacities might also be at play.

Recent work has shown that young children can learn about preferences by observing the choices and emotional reactions of other people, but there is no unified account of how this learning occurs. We show that a rational model, built on ideas from economics and computer science, explains the behavior of children in several experiments

Children categorize native-accented speakers as local and non-native-accented speakers as foreign, suggesting they use accent (i.e., phonological proficiency) to determine social group membership. However, it is unclear if accent is the strongest - and only - group marker children use to determine social group membership, or whether other aspects of language, such as syntax and semantics, are also important markers. To test this, five- to eight-year-old monolingual English-speaking children were asked to judge whether individuals who varied in phonological, syntactic, and semantic proficiency were local or foreign. Children were also asked which individual they wanted as a friend. Children prioritized phonological proficiency over syntactic and semantic proficiency to determine social group membership. However, with age, children begin to shift toward prioritizing syntactic and semantic proficiency over phonological proficiency in their friendship decisions, suggesting that the capacity to integrate different aspects of a speaker's linguistic proficiency changes with development.

Humans are motivated to connect with others and are sensitive to social exclusion-intentionally leaving out others. This ability to detect social exclusion is suggested to be evolutionarily adaptive, biologically hardwired, and an important feature of social-cognitive development. Yet it is unclear when children start to independently detect social exclusion. Previous developmental research on social exclusion has focused on children older than 4 years of age, but recent infancy research has suggested younger children may be able to process complex social interactions such as social exclusion. The present study is the first to examine whether 2- to 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and if they prefer to affiliate with individuals who have been excluded over individuals who exclude others. Across 2 experiments, 2- and 3-year-old children (N = 140) viewed exclusive group interactions, in which 2 agents unjustly excluded 1 agent, and children were asked to choose whether they preferred to play with an excluded agent or an exclusive agent. Three-year-old children consistently preferred to play with the excluded agent, whereas 2-year-old children showed no preference. Three-year-old children did not show a preference among agents engaged in inclusive interactions and did not prefer an agent who refused to engage with a group, showing that 3-year-old children distinguish unjust exclusion from other types of interactions. Together, these findings suggest 3-year-old children detect social exclusion and are motivated to affiliate with unjustly excluded agents over those who exclude others, whereas these capacities are still developing in 2-year-old children.