You have just learned in Chapter 8 that every year of early childhood advances motor skills, brain development, and impulse control. In Chapter 6, you learned about the impressive development of memory and language in the first two years of life. Each of these developmental advances affects cognition. Thinking during early childhood is multi-faceted, creative, and remarkable.

Early childhood is the time of preoperational intelligence, the second of Piaget’s four periods of cognitive development (described in Table 2.3 on p. 49). He called early-childhood thinking preoperational because children do not yet use logical operations (reasoning processes) (Inhelder & Piaget, 1964/2013).

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Preoperational children are no longer in the stage of sensorimotor intelligence because they can think in symbols, not just via senses and motor skills. In symbolic thought, an object or word can stand for something else, including something out of sight or imagined. Language is the most apparent example of symbolic thought, because using words makes it possible to think about many more things at once. However, although vocabulary and imagination can soar in early childhood, logical connections between ideas are not yet active, not yet operational.

The word dog, for instance, is at first only the family dog sniffing at the child, not yet a symbol (Callaghan, 2013). By age 2, the word becomes a symbol: It can refer to a remembered dog, or a plastic dog, or an imagined dog. Symbolic thought allows for the language explosion (detailed later in this chapter), which enables children to talk about thoughts and memories. However, since thought during these years is preoperational, it is hard for young children to understand the historical connections, similarities, and differences between dogs and wolves, or even between a Labrador retriever and a poodle.

Symbolic thought helps explain animism, the belief of many young children that natural objects (such as a tree or a cloud) are alive and that nonhuman animals have the same characteristics as the child.

Many children’s stories include animals or objects that talk and listen (Aesop’s fables, Winnie-the-Pooh, Goodnight Moon, The Day the Crayons Quit). Preoperational thought is symbolic and magical, not logical and realistic. Childish animism gradually disappears with maturation (Kesselring & Müller, 2011).

Piaget described symbolic thought as characteristic of preoperational thought. He noted four limitations that make logic difficult until about age 6: centration, focus on appearance, static reasoning, and irreversibility.

Centration is the tendency to focus on one aspect of a situation to the exclusion of all others. Young children may, for example, insist that Daddy is a father, not a brother, because they center on the role that he fills for them. The daddy example illustrates a particular type of centration that Piaget called egocentrism—literally, “self-centeredness.” Egocentric children contemplate the world exclusively from their personal perspective.

Egocentrism is not selfishness. One 3-year-old chose to buy a model car as a birthday present for his mother: His “behavior was not selfish or greedy; he carefully wrapped the present and gave it to his mother with an expression that clearly showed that he expected her to love it” (Crain, 2005, p. 108).

A second characteristic of preoperational thought is a focus on appearance to the exclusion of other attributes. For instance, a girl given a short haircut might worry that she has turned into a boy. In preoperational thought, a thing is whatever it appears to be—evident in the joy young children have in wearing the hats or shoes of a grown-up, clomping noisily and unsteadily around the living room.

Third, preoperational children use static reasoning. They believe that the world is stable, unchanging, always in the state in which they currently encounter it. Many children cannot imagine that their own parents were ever children. If they are told that Grandma is their mother’s mother, they still do not understand how people change with maturation.

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One preschooler wanted his grandmother to tell his mother to never spank him because “she has to do what her mother says.” Often a preschooler whose baby brother or sister sucks a bottle wants a bottle, too. The answer, “You had a bottle when you were little, now you are a big kid,” is not convincing.

The fourth characteristic of preoperational thought is irreversibility. Preoperational thinkers fail to recognize that reversing a process sometimes restores whatever existed before. A young girl might cry because her mother put lettuce on her sandwich. Overwhelmed by her desire to have things “just right,” she might reject the food even after the lettuce is removed because she believes that what is done cannot be undone.

Piaget highlighted several ways in which preoperational intelligence disregards logic. A famous set of experiments involved conservation, the notion that the amount of something remains the same (is conserved) despite changes in its appearance.

Suppose two identical glasses contain the same amount of pink lemonade, and the liquid from one of these glasses is poured into a taller, narrower glass. If young children are asked whether one glass contains more or, alternatively, both glasses contain the same amount, they will insist that the narrower glass (with the higher level) has more. (See Figure 9.1 for other examples.)

All four characteristics of preoperational thought are evident in this mistake. Young children fail to understand conservation because they focus (center) on what they see (appearance), noticing only the immediate (static) condition. It does not occur to them that they could reverse the process and recreate the level of a moment earlier (irreversibility).

Piaget’s original tests of conservation required children to respond verbally to an adult’s questions. Later research has found that when the tests of logic are simplified or made playful, young children may succeed. In many ways, children indicate via eye movements or gestures that they know something before they can say it in words (Goldin-Meadow & Alibali, 2013). Further, conservation and many more logical ideas are understood bit by bit, with active, guided experience, and glimmers of understanding are apparent even at age 4 (Sophian, 2013).

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As with sensorimotor intelligence in infancy, Piaget underestimated what preoperational children could understand. Piaget was right that young children are not as logical as older children, but he did not realize how much they could learn.

Brain scans, video responses measured in milliseconds, and the computer programs that developmentalists now use were not available to him. Studies from the past 20 years show intellectual activity before age 6 that was not previously understood; they also show that Piaget was perceptive about many aspects of cognition (Crone & Ridderinkhof, 2011).

Given the new data, it is easy to criticize Piaget. However, many adults make the same mistakes. For instance, the shapes of boxes and bottles in the grocery store make it hard to compare volume visually and so undermine adults’ sense of conservation—that’s why laws require that ounces or grams be listed on the containers. Animism is evident in many religious and cultural myths that include talking, thinking animals.

Indeed, many adults in the United States encourage children to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and so on. If we consider preschoolers foolish to imagine that animals and plants have human traits, how should we judge ourselves if we talk to our pets or mourn the death of a tree? When adults say, “Nothing ever changes,” or, “He can never be trusted,” is that static reasoning?

A review of the research finds that children are “naïve skeptics … as likely to doubt as to believe” (Woolley & Ghossainy, 2013, p. 1496). They use their best judgment and most reliable sources to decide what is true. Adults are often more skeptical than young children because they have more experience, but they also believe in things not seen (from germs to heaven) because other adults whom they trust (scientists or clergy, depending on specifics) say such unseen things exist.

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Preschoolers also rely on their own experience and on trusted sources, but their social network is more limited. Consequently, they rely heavily on their parents and on rules governing behavior (Lane & Harris, 2014). Because of their cognitive limits, smart 3-year-olds sometimes are foolish, as Caleb is. (See below.)

For decades, the magical, illogical, and self-centered aspects of cognition dominated our concepts of early-childhood thought. Scientists were understandably awed by Piaget. His description of egocentrism and magical thinking was confirmed daily by anecdotes of young children’s behavior.

Vygotsky emphasized another side of early cognition—that each person’s thinking is shaped by other people’s wishes and goals. He emphasized the social aspects of development, a contrast to Piaget’s emphasis on the individual. That led Vygotsky to notice the power of culture, acknowledging that “the culturally specific nature of experience is an integral part of how the person thinks and acts,” as several developmentalists explain (Gauvain et al., 2011). Learning is not done in isolation; according to many contemporary educators, it depends on joint engagement.

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Vygotsky believed that cognitive development is embedded in a social context at every age (Vygotsky, 1934/1987). He stressed that children are curious and observant. They ask questions—about how machines work, why weather changes, where the sky ends—and seek answers from more knowledgeable mentors, who might be their parents, teachers, older siblings, or just a stranger. The answers they get are affected by the mentors’ perceptions and assumptions—that is, their culture—which shapes their thought.

As you remember from Chapter 2, children learn through guided participation, as mentors teach them. Parents are their first guides, although children are guided by many others, too.

According to Vygotsky, children learn because their mentors do the following:

Overall, the ability to learn from mentors indicates intelligence; according to Vygotsky, “What children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone” (Vygotsky, 1980, p. 85).

Vygotsky believed that all individuals learn within their zone of proximal development (ZPD), an intellectual arena in which new ideas and skills can be mastered. Proximal means “near,” so the ZPD includes the ideas children are close to understanding and the skills they can almost master, but are not yet able to demonstrate independently. How and when children learn depends, in part, on the wisdom and willingness of mentors to provide scaffolding, or temporary sensitive support, to help them within their developmental zone. (Developmental Link: The ZPD is discussed in Chapter 2.)

Good mentors provide plenty of scaffolding, encouraging children to look both ways before crossing the street (while holding the child’s hand) or letting them stir the cake batter (perhaps while covering the child’s hand on the spoon handle, in guided participation). Crucial in every activity is joint engagement, when both learner and mentor are actively involved together in the learning zone (Adamson et al., 2014).

As always, cultural differences are crucial. Consider book reading, for instance, an activity parents worldwide do with their young children, in part because it fosters language, reading, and moral development. When an adult reads to children, the adult scaffolds—explaining, pointing, listening, describing—within the child’s zone of development. Middle-class American adults do not tell the child to be quiet, but often prolong the session by expanding on the child’s questions and asking questions of their own, so that the book reading becomes a scaffold for dialogue.

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By contrast, book reading in low-income families tends to emphasize content over conversation, with parents telling children what is happening in the story and expecting the child to listen and learn. Comparative research finds that parents scaffold whatever is important in their culture, with Chinese American parents more likely to point out problems encountered by the book’s characters because of misbehavior and the Mexican Americans more likely to highlight emotions that the characters might feel (Luo et al., 2014).

Sometimes scaffolding is inadvertent, as when children observe something said or done and then try to do likewise—including things that adults would rather the child not do. Young children curse, kick, and worse because someone else showed them how. One of the ominous behaviors that preschool teachers sometimes witness is a young child trying to get another child to engage in sex. The child must have seen something most adults think children should not see. (This is quite different from the normal curiosity that children have about each other’s bodies.)

More benignly, children imitate habits and customs that are meaningless, a trait called overimitation, evident in humans but rare in other animals. This stems from the child’s eagerness to learn from mentors, allowing “rapid, high-fidelity intergenerational transmission of cultural forms” (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010, p. 735).

Overimitation was demonstrated in a series of experiments with 3- to 6-year-olds, 64 of them from Bushman communities in South Africa and Botswana and, for comparison, 64 from cities in Australia and 19 from aboriginal communities within Australia. Australian middle-class adults often scaffold for children with words and actions, but Bushman adults rarely do. The researchers expected the urban Australian children to follow adult demonstrations, since they were accustomed to learning in that way. They did not expect the Bushman children to do so (Nielsen et al., 2014).

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In part of the study, some children one-by-one from each cultural group observed an adult perform irrelevant actions, such as waving a red stick above a box three times and then using that stick to push down a knob to open the box, which could be easily and more efficiently opened by merely pulling down the same knob by hand. Then children were given the stick and the box. No matter what their cultural background, the children followed the adult example, waving the stick three times and not using their hands directly on the knob.

Other children did not see the demonstration. When they were given the stick and asked to open the box, they simply pulled the knob. Then they observed an adult do the stick-waving opening—and they did something odd: They copied those inefficient actions, even though they already knew the easy way to open the box (Nielsen & Tomaselli, 2010).

Apparently, children everywhere learn from others through observation, even if they have not been taught to do so. They even learn to do things contrary to their prior learning. Thus, scaffolding occurs through observation as well as explicit guidance. Across cultures, overimitation is striking and even generalizes to other similar situations. Children everywhere are strongly inclined to learn whatever adults from their culture do (Nielsen et al., 2014).

That is exactly what Vygotsky expected and explained. Curiously, young children are not adept at figuring out new ways to use various tools (Nielsen et al., 2014). Young children’s minds are quick to imitate what adults do, but slow to figure out creative ways to accomplish their goals. That innovative ability, apparently, must wait until more cognitive maturation has occurred.

Although all the objects of a culture guide children, Vygotsky believed that words are especially pivotal. He thought language advances thinking in two ways (Fernyhough, 2010). The first way is with internal dialogue, or private speech, in which people talk to themselves (Vygotsky, 2012). Young children use private speech often. They talk aloud to review, decide, and explain events to themselves (and, incidentally, to anyone else within earshot) (Al-Namlah et al., 2012).

Older preschoolers are more selective, effective, and circumspect, sometimes whispering. Audible or not, private speech aids cognition and self-reflection; adults should encourage it (Perels et al., 2009; Benigno et al., 2011). Many people of all ages talk to themselves when alone or write down ideas to help them think. That is private speech as well. Preschool curricula based on Vygotsky’s ideas use games, play, social interaction, and private speech to develop executive functioning (Winsler et al., 2009).

The second way in which language advances thinking, according to Vygotsky, is by mediating the social interaction that is vital to learning (Vygotsky, 2012). This social mediation function of speech occurs during both formal instruction (when teachers explain things) and casual conversation.

Words entice people into the zone of proximal development, as mentors guide children to learn numbers, recall memories, and follow routines. Indeed, children who count out loud and use other aspects of private speech to help them with numbers are likely to advance in mathematical understanding.

A practical use of Vygotsky’s theory concerns the current emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education. Because finding more young people to specialize in those fields is crucial for economic growth, educators and political leaders are continually seeking ways to make STEM fields attractive to adolescents and young adults of all ethnicities (Rogers-Chapman, 2013; Wang, 2013).

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Research on early childhood suggests that STEM education actually begins long before high school. This is increasingly recognized by experts, who note that most parents and teachers have much to learn about math and science if they wish to teach these subjects to young children (Hong et al., 2013; Bers et al., 2013).

For example, learning about numbers is possible very early in life. Even babies have a sense of whether one, two, or three objects are in a display, although exactly what infants understand about numbers is controversial (Varga et al., 2010). If Vygotsky is correct that words are tools, toddlers need to hear number words and science concepts early (not just counting and shapes, but fractions and science principles, such as the laws of motion) so that other knowledge becomes accessible. In math understanding, it is evident that preschoolers gradually learn to

These and many other cognitive accomplishments of young children have been the subject of extensive research: Mentoring and language are always found to be pivotal.

Especially in math, computers can promote a dialogue that helps contemporary young children learn. Educational software becomes “a conduit for collaborative learning” (Cicconi, 2014, p. 58) as Web 2.0 programs respond to the particular abilities and needs of the learner.

Often in preschool classrooms with interactive education, two or three children work together, each mentoring the other, talking aloud as the computer prompts them. This can occur at home, too: Educators frown on using a computer screen as a substitute for human interaction, but they sometimes consider it an adjunct to promote learning, just as a book might be (Alper, 2013).

Culture affects language, which in turn fosters math knowledge. For example, English-speaking and Chinese-speaking preschoolers seem to have equal comprehension of 1 to 10, but the Chinese are ahead in their understanding of 11 to 19. Among the many possible explanations is a linguistic one: In all the Chinese dialects, the names for 11 to 19 are logical and direct, the equivalent of ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, and so on. This system is easier for young children to understand than eleven, twelve, thirteen, and so on.

German-speaking children may be slower to master numbers from 20 to 99, since they say the equivalent of one-and-twenty, two-and-twenty, and so on, not twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. In these and many other ways, cultural restraints and routines affect young children’s understanding of math (Göbel et al., 2011).

By age 3 or 4, children’s brains are mature enough to comprehend numbers, store memories, and recognize routines. Whether or not children actually demonstrate such understanding depends on what they hear and how they participate in various activities within their families, schools, and cultures.

Some 2-year-olds hear sentences such as “One, two, three, takeoff,” and “Here are two cookies,” and “Dinner in five minutes” several times a day. They are shown an interesting bit of moss, or are alerted to the phases of the moon, or learn about the relationship between pace, breathing, and the steepness of a hill. Others never hear such comments—and they have a harder time with math in first grade, with science in the third grade, and with STEM subjects when they are older. According to Vygotsky, words mediate between brain potential and comprehension, and this process begins long before formal education.

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Piaget and Vygotsky both recognized that children work to understand their world. No contemporary developmental scientist doubts that. How do children acquire their impressive knowledge? Part of the answer is that children do more than gain words and concepts; they develop theories to help them understand and remember—theories that arise from both brain maturation and personal experience (Baron-Cohen et al., 2013).

Humans of all ages want explanations. Theory-theory refers to the idea that children naturally construct theories to explain whatever they see and hear. In other words, the theory about how children think is that they construct a theory. All people

search for causal regularities in the world around us. We are perpetually driven to look for deeper explanations of our experience, and broader and more reliable predictions about it…. Children seem, quite literally, to be born with … the desire to understand the world and the desire to discover how to behave in it.

[Gopnik, 2001, p. 66]

According to theory-theory, the explanation for cognition is that humans seek reasons, causes, and underlying principles to make sense of their experience. That requires curiosity and thought, connecting bits of knowledge and observations, which is what young children do. Humans always want theories (even false ones, sometimes) to help them understand the world. Especially in childhood, theories are subject to change as new evidence accumulates (Meltzoff & Gopnik, 2013).

Exactly how do children seek explanations? They ask questions, and, if they are not satisfied with the answers, they develop their own theories. This is particularly evident in children’s understanding of God and religion. One child thought his grandpa died because God was lonely; another thought thunder occurred because God was rearranging the furniture.

Theories do not appear randomly. Children wonder about the underlying purpose of whatever they observe, and in order to develop a theory about what causes what and why, they note how often a particular event occurs. They follow the same processes that scientists do: asking questions, developing hypotheses, gathering data, and drawing conclusions.

Of course, a child’s method of understanding and interpreting experience lacks the rigor of scientific experiments, but questions of physics, biology, and the social sciences are explored: “infants and young children not only detect statistical patterns, they use those patterns to test hypotheses about people and things” (Gopnik, 2012, p. 1625). Their conclusions are not always correct: Like all good scientists, they allow new data to promote revision.

For instance, when I was a young child, I noticed that my father never carried an umbrella. Since I looked up to him, I assumed he must have had a good reason. Neither did my brother, which confirmed for me that my father was right. Consequently, throughout all my adult years, I never carried an umbrella.

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Over time I developed many reasons for my father’s behavior. He must have realized, I decided, that umbrellas poke people in the eye, get forgotten, blow away, and are lost. Then, when Dad was in his 80s, my brother asked him why he didn’t like umbrellas. The answer stunned me: “Chamberlain.”

Neville Chamberlain was famous for carrying an umbrella when he was prime minister of England from 1937 to 1940. He was photographed with his black umbrella after signing the Munich Agreement in 1938, when he mistakenly and naively announced that Hitler would not attack England. For Dad, umbrellas symbolized foolish trust and he said that no political leader would dare carry an umbrella. I had constructed a theory to justify something I observed. That is theory-theory.

In the egocentrism of early childhood, preschoolers theorize that everyone operates as they themselves do, which makes them more aware of situational differences than personality differences. For instance, each child knows that he or she acts differently, say, in a familiar playground on a sunny day than on an unfamiliar street in a thunderstorm. Context is crucial, but the child is the same person in both situations.

That explains the results of a series of experiments in which children observe that one puppet refuses to play on a trampoline or ride a bicycle and another puppet does both. Four-year-olds theorize that the playing puppet must know that the trampoline is safe, not that one puppet is brave and the other fearful. By age 6, children are more able to explain behavior based on temperament, not situation (Seiver et al., 2013).

One common theory-theory is that everyone intends to do things correctly. For that reason, when asked to repeat something ungrammatical that an adult says, children often correct the grammar. They theorize that the adult intended to speak grammatically but failed to do so (Over & Gattis, 2010).

This is an example of a general principle: Children theorize about intentions before they imitate what they see. As you have read, when children saw an adult wave a stick before opening a box, the children theorized that, since the adult did it deliberately, stick-waving must somehow be important.

Mental processes—thoughts, emotions, beliefs, motives, and intentions—are among the most complicated and puzzling phenomena that humans encounter every day. Adults wonder why people fall in love with the particular persons they do, why they vote for the candidates they do, or why they make foolish choices—from signing for a huge mortgage to buying an overripe cucumber. Children are likewise puzzled about a playmate’s unexpected anger, a sibling’s generosity, or an aunt’s too-wet kiss.

To know what goes on in another’s mind, people develop a folk psychology, which includes ideas about other people’s thinking, called theory of mind. Theory of mind is an emergent ability, slow to develop but typically beginning in most children at about age 4 (Carlson et al., 2013). Some aspects of theory of mind develop sooner than age 4, and some later. However, longitudinal research finds that the preschool years typically begin with 2-year-olds not knowing that other people think differently than they do but end with 6-year-olds having a well-developed theory of mind (Wellman et al., 2011).

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Generally, realizing that thoughts do not mirror reality is beyond very young children, but that realization dawns on them sometime after age 3. It then occurs to them that people can be deliberately deceived or fooled—an idea that requires some theory of mind.

In one of dozens of false-belief tests that researchers have developed, a child watches a puppet named Max put a toy dog into a red box. Then Max leaves and the child sees the dog taken out of the red box and put in a blue box. When Max returns, the child is asked, “Where will Max look for the dog?” Most 3-year-olds confidently say, “In the blue box”; most 6-year-olds correctly say, “In the red box,” a pattern found in more than a dozen nations. Interestingly, although some cultural differences appear, the most notable differences are neurological, not cultural: Deaf or autistic children are remarkably slow to develop theory of mind (Carlson et al., 2013).

The development of theory of mind can be seen when young children try to escape punishment by lying. Their face often betrays them: worried or shifting eyes, pursed lips, and so on. Parents sometimes say, “I know when you are lying,” and, to the consternation of most 3-year-olds, parents are usually right.

In one experiment, 247 children, aged 3 to 5, were left alone at a table that had an upside-down cup covering dozens of candies (Evans et al., 2011). The children were told not to peek, and the experimenter left the room. For 142 children (57 percent), curiosity overcame obedience. They peeked, spilling so many candies onto the table that they could not put them back under the cup. The examiner returned, asking how the candies got on the table. Only one-fourth of the participants (more often the younger ones) told the truth.

The rest lied, and their skill increased with their age. The 3-year-olds typically told hopeless lies (e.g., “The candies got out by themselves”); the 4-year-olds told unlikely lies (e.g., “Other children came in and knocked over the cup”). Some of the 5-year-olds, however, told plausible lies (e.g., “My elbow knocked over the cup accidentally”).

This particular study was done in Beijing, China, but the results seem universal: Older children are better liars. Beyond the age differences, the experimenters found that the more logical liars were also more advanced in theory of mind and executive functioning (Evans et al., 2011), which indicates a more mature prefrontal cortex (see Figure 9.2).

Of course, many egocentric children convince themselves that something is true when it is not—as do some adults. This does not mean that they are unable to recount what they see and hear, but it does mean that what they say should be evaluated, not swallowed whole. (See A View From Science.)

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Many studies have found that a child’s ability to develop theories correlates with neurological maturation, which also correlates with advances in executive processing—the reflective, anticipatory capacity of the mind (Mar, 2011; Baron-Cohen et al., 2013). Detailed brain studies find that theory of mind activates several areas of the brain (Koster-Hale & Saxe, 2014). This makes sense, as theory of mind is a complex ability that humans develop in social contexts, and thus is not likely to reside in just one neurological region.

Evidence for the crucial role of brain maturation comes from the other research on the same 3- to 5-year-olds whose lying was studied. The experimenters asked the children to say “day” when they saw a picture of the moon and “night” when they saw a picture of the sun.

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The children needed to inhibit their automatic reaction, and the ability to do this indicates advanced executive function, which correlates with maturation of the prefrontal cortex. Even when compared to other children who were the same age, those who failed the day–night tests typically told impossible lies, whereas their age-mates who were high in executive function told more plausible lies (Evans et al., 2011).

Does the crucial role of neurological maturation make context irrelevant? No: Nurture is always important. For instance, research finds that language development fosters theory of mind, especially when mother–child conversations involve thoughts and wishes. Similarly, social interactions with other children advance a child’s thinking process, especially when the other children are siblings of about the same age (McAlister & Peterson, 2013). As one expert quipped, “Two older siblings are worth about a year of chronological age” (Perner, 2000, p. 383).

As brothers and sisters argue, agree, compete, and cooperate, and as older siblings fool younger ones, it dawns on 3-year-olds that not everyone thinks as they do. Theory of mind advances. By age 5, siblings have learned to persuade their younger siblings to give them a toy, and they’ve learned how to gain parental sympathy by acting as if their older brothers and sisters have victimized them. Parents, beware: Asking, “Who started it?” may be irrelevant.