Broadly, our research addresses two central questions: 

  • How do children make sense of their social world (e.g., judgments about others and their implications for prejudice and stereotyping)? 

  • How do children learn to control their own thoughts and behavior in ways that support cognitive and social functioning in early to late childhood (e.g., staying focused on tasks; making friends)?

Developing ideas about other people

Early in life, young children begin to think about what other people are like, particularly in terms of global trait categories such as “niceness” and “meanness.” We have shown that children pay attention not only to the kind of behavior that they see (e.g., generosity), but also how much evidence they have (e.g., several examples, rather than only one example, of generosity), when making a personality judgment about another person. 

Related articles

Trait or Testimony? Children’s Preferences for Positive Informants (PDF) → Croce, R. C., & Boseovski, J. J. (2019). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 190, 104726.

Seeing the World Through Rose-Colored Glasses? Neglect of Consensus Information in Young Children’s Personality Judgments (PDF) →
Boseovski, J. J., & Lee, K. (2008). Social Development, 2, 399-416.

Children's Use of Frequency Information for Trait Categorization and Behavioral Prediction (PDF) →
Boseovski, J. J., & Lee, K. (2006). Developmental Psychology, 42,500-513.

Emergent beliefs about social hierarchies

Social hierarchies permeate children's social lives, including school, home, and peer contexts. Current projects are focused on whether children differentiate between two types of hierarchies: social status and power. We are particularly interested in how children's conceptualizations of status and power change from early childhood to middle and late childhood. We are also interested in how gender and other social categories influence children's beliefs about status and power. This line of research can inform how children think about leadership and how children perceive different kinds of leaders.

Related PRESENTATIONS

Examining the Interplay Between Social Status and Competence Understanding Across Development (PDF) → Yuly, A.C., & Boseovski, J. J. (2021, March 7-9). [Poster presentation]. Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN, United States.

Children’s learning in informal settings

There is an increasing interest in how children learn in informal education settings such as museums, science centers, and zoos. Our lab has an established and collaborative relationship with the Greensboro Science Center (GSC) to explore many questions related to this topic. Previous research that we have conducted at the GSC examined children's preference for and memory of information about a novel animal when learning from a zookeeper (i.e., an "expert") versus a maternal figure. We have also examined how parents and children interact and communicate at various play-based exhibits within the GSC. Our current research is focused on the GSC's new animal hospital that allows visitors to observe veterinary procedures up close as they are occurring. We are curious if children's observations of these procedures affect their biological understanding, their views of expertise, and their knowledge of and attitudes towards health procedures. We, along with the GSC, are also generally interested in how children view conservation efforts and have started a line of research to examine if certain types of messages affect children's desires to engage in conservation-related behaviors.

Related articles

Children's informant judgments and recall of valenced facts at a Science Center → Marble, K.E., Caporaso, J. S., Bettencourt, K. M., Boseovski, J. J., Pathman, T., Marcovitch, S., & Scales, M. (2021). Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 2262.

Profiles of personality attribution in childhood

In middle childhood, many children exhibit a “positivity bias” about other people where they attend to information selectively to maintain an optimistic view of others. But not all children exhibit this bias—some children seem to see others in neutral or negative ways. We are interested in understanding the basis of these biases and what they mean for children’s safety and well-being (e.g., excessive trust in others, the ability to make friends). We are currently working with a large NICHD-funded data set in which we are characterizing different profiles of personality attribution and our future plans include cross-cultural extensions of this work in China to understand the degree to which socialization impacts children’s views of other people.

Related articles

Traits or Circumstances? Children’s Explanations of Positive and Negative Behavioral Outcomes (PDF) → Boseovski, J. J., & Lapan, C. (2021). Cognitive Development, 58, 101019.

Theory of Mind and Children's Trait Attributions About Average and Typically Stigmatized Peers (PDF) →
Lapan, C., & Boseovski, J. J. (2015). Infant and Child Development, 25, 158-178.

Trust in Testimony About Strangers: Young Children Prefer Reliable Informants Who Make Positive Attributions (PDF) → Boseovski, J. J. (2012). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 111(3), 543-551.

Evidence for "Rose-Colored Glasses": An Examination of the Positivity Bias in Young Children's Personality Judgments (PDF) → Boseovski, J. J. (2010). Child Development Perspectives, 4, 212-218.

Cognitive control in social contexts

We are one of the pioneering research groups investigating how cognitive control is related to processing and responding to social information throughout early to late childhood. We are currently conducting studies on how this relation presents itself in older children. For example, preschool aged children begin to experience sophisticated and complex social situations with their peers. While many of these social situations are positive, peer conflict also occurs in the preschool classroom. It is important for children to respond to conflict in a positive, non-aggressive manner to promote acceptance and friendship. We are interested in understanding how children’s abilities to cognitively control their behavior support prosocial responses to peer conflict.  

Related articleS

Executive Function and the Development of Social Information Processing During the Preschool Years (PDF) → Caporaso J.S., Marcovitch, S., & Boseovski, J.J. (2021). Cognitive Development, 58, 101018.

The Effect of Taxing Situations on Preschool Children’s Responses to Peer Conflict (PDF) → Caporaso, J.S., & Marcovitch, M. (2021). Cognitive Development, 57, 100989.

The Individual Contributions of Three Executive Function Components to Preschool Social Competence (PDF)→ Caporaso, J. S., Boseovski, J. J., & Marcovitch, S. (2019). Infant and Child Development, 28(4), 2132.

The Hierarchical Competing Systems Model Provides a Process Account of Social Decision Making [Letter to the Editor] (PDF) → Boseovski, J. J., & Marcovitch, S. (2012). Human Development, 7-10. 


We have found that the social act of joint attention (when parent and child attend to the same stimulus) at 14 months of age predicts better cognitive control at 18 months of age.

Related articles

Examining Executive Function in the Second Year of Life: Coherence Stability and Relations to Joint Attention and Language (PDF) → Miller, S. E., & Marcovitch, S. (2015). Developmental Psychology, 51(1), 101-114.

How Theory of Mind and Executive Function Co-Develop (PDF) → Miller, S. E., & Marcovitch, S. (2012). The Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 3, 597-625. 

Learning from others

Young children rely on other people to learn about many aspects of the world. In some situations, children are discriminating learners who pick up on competence readily and disregard inappropriate sources of information. In others, they struggle to do so. We are interested in the factors that contribute to social learning from others and our work in this domain has taken many forms. For example, we have shown that children can differentiate between professionals (i.e., zookeepers) and laypersons when it comes to learning facts about novel animals. Current projects focus on children’s use of social comparison information to inform self-evaluation, children’s cultural learning, and the acquisition of new information in informal, everyday settings such as Science Centers.

Related articles

Children’s Informant Judgments and Recall of Valenced Facts at a Science Center (PDF) → Marble, K.E., Caporaso, J.S., Bettencourt, K.M., Boseovski, J.J., Pathman, T., Marcovitch, S., & Scales, M.L. (2021). Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 2262.

Is Honesty Always the Best Policy? Children's Perceptions of Negative Performance Feedback → Marble, K.E., Boseovski, J.J., & Hill, A. (2021). Social Development, 1-14.

Content Counts: A Trait and Moral Reasoning Framework for Children’s Selective Social Learning (PDF) → Marble, K.E., & Boseovski J.J. (2020). In J. B. Benson (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (pp. 95–136). Elsevier Academic Press.

Children’s Judgments of Cultural Expertise: The Influence of Cultural Status and Learning Method (PDF) → Marble, K. E., & Boseovski, J. J. (2019). The Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development, 180(1), 17-30.

Evaluating and Approaching a Strange Animal: Children’s Trust in Informant Testimony (PDF) →
Boseovski, J. J., & Thurman, S. L. (2014). Child Development, 85(2), 824-834.

Cognitive control of behavior

Many of our lab interests center on how children acquire the ability to control their own behavior in challenging contexts (e.g., stopping themselves from carrying out a well-learned behavior in favor of a novel one). Research in our lab has shown that one way to do this successfully is to maintain the goal in mind, a skill often facilitated by language.

Related articles

Tracking the Within-Trial, Cross-Trial, and Developmental Dynamics of Cognitive Control: Evidence From the Simon Task (PDF) → Erb, C. D., & Marcovitch, S. (2018). Child Development, 90, 831-848.

Deconstructing the Gratton effect: Targeting Dissociable Trial Sequence Effects in Children, Pre-adolescents, and Adults → Erb, C.D., & Marcovitch, S. (2018). Cognition, 179, 150-162.

Young Children’s Ability to Use Ordinal Labels in a Spatial Search Task (PDF) → Miller, S. E., Marcovitch, S., Boseovski, J. J., & Lewkowicz, D. J. (2015). Merrill Palmer Quarterly, 61(3), 345-361.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other: Distinctiveness and Executive Function in Preschoolers (PDF) → Miller, S. E., Chatley, N., Marcovitch, S., & Rogers, M. M. (2014). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 118, 143-151.

Goal Neglect and Working Memory Capacity in 4- to 6-Year-Old Children (PDF) →
Marcovitch, S., Boseovski, J. J., Knapp, R. J., & Kane, M. J. (2010). Child Development, 81, 1687-1695.