Sara R. Nichols

To Share or Not to Share: When Do Toddlers Respond to Another's Needs?

The developmental origins of sharing remain little understood. Using procedures adapted from research on prosocial behavior in chimpanzees, we presented 18- and 25-month-old children with a sharing task in which they could choose to deliver food to themselves only, or to both themselves and another person, thereby making it possible for them to share without personal sacrifice. The potential recipient, a friendly adult, was either silent about her needs and wants or made them explicit. Both younger and older toddlers chose randomly when the recipient was silent. However, when the recipient vocalized her desires 25-month-olds shared whereas younger children did not. Thus, we demonstrate that children voluntarily share valued resources with others by the end of the second year of life, but that this depends on explicit communicative cues about anothers need or desire.

Mine or Yours? Development of Sharing in Toddlers in Relation to Ownership Understanding

To examine early developments in other-oriented resource sharing, fifty-one 18- and 24-month-old children were administered 6 tasks with toys or food that could be shared with an adult playmate who had none. On each task the playmate communicated her desire for the items in a series of progressively more explicit cues. Twenty-four-month-olds shared frequently and spontaneously. Eighteen-month-olds shared when given multiple opportunities and when the partner provided enough communicative support. Younger children engaged in self-focused and hypothesis-testing behavior in lieu of sharing more often than did older children. Ownership understanding, separately assessed, was positively associated with sharing and negatively associated with non-sharing behavior, independent of age and language ability.

The Head Bone's Connected to the Neck Bone: When Do Toddlers Represent Their Own Body Topography?

Developments in very young childrens topographic representations of their own bodies were examined. Sixty-one 20- and 30-month-old children were administered tasks that indexed the ability to locate specific body parts on oneself and knowledge of how ones body parts are spatially organized, as well as body-size knowledge and self-awareness. Age differences in performance emerged for every task. Body-part localization and body spatial configuration knowledge were associated; however, body topography knowledge was not associated with body-size knowledge. Both were related to traditional measures of self-awareness, mediated by their common associations with age. It is concluded that children possess an explicit, if rudimentary, topographic representation of their own bodys shape, structure, and size by 30 months of age.

Toddlers' understanding of peers' emotions.

ABSTRACT The second year of life sees dramatic developments in infants’ ability to understand emotions in adults alongside their growing interest in peers. In this study, the authors used a social-referencing paradigm to examine whether 12-, 18-, and 24-month-old children could use a peers positive or negative emotion messages about toys to regulate their own behavior with the toys. They found that 12-month-olds decreased their play with toys toward which a peer had expressed either positive or negative emotion compared with play following a peers neutral attention toward a toy. Also, 18-month-olds did not respond systematically, but 24-month-old children increased their toy play after watching a peer display negative affect toward the toy. Regardless of their age, children with siblings decreased their play with toys toward which they had seen a peer display fear, the typical social-referencing response. The authors discuss results in the context of developmental changes in social understanding and peer interaction over the second year of life.