Our Research

At the Developing Minds Lab, we explore how babies and young children come to understand the world around them—both the social world of people and relationships, and the physical world of objects and animals. Through fun, play-based tasks, we study how infants and children think, and how parents support children's learning.

Understanding the Social World

From their first moments, babies are immersed in a world full of people, relationships, and social activity. How do they make sense of this rich social environment? In our research, we study how infants begin to understand human behavior and learn to engage in social interactions with others. We examine how these social capacities develop, what supports them (like social experiences, interactions with caregivers, and brain development), and how they lay the foundation for skills like language, cooperation, and social reasoning.

Children's understanding of people—including their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors—continues to mature throughout the preschool, elementary, and even teenage years. We study how this social understanding changes across development, how it varies from child to child, and the factors that shape its development.

Understanding Categories

Children use categories to guide their learning and interactions with the environment. Categories are an important mental tool because they allow us to make inferences about the world. For example, if a child learns that an individual butterfly grew from a caterpillar, drinks nectar, and can taste with its feet, they can generalize these facts beyond that specific butterfly to other members of the category. We study how children think and learn about categories, and how they use their category knowledge to understand the world. We also explore how parents help build this knowledge—through the words they use, the comparisons they make, and the questions they ask during everyday conversations.

The Role of Parents in Early Learning

Children learn about both the social and physical world through everyday interactions with others. Parents, in particular, play a central role in shaping children’s early learning and development. We study the many ways parents support children’s learning—including through play, everyday conversations, and warm, responsive caregiving. Our goal is to better understand how parental input contributes to children’s growing knowledge and social abilities.

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Publications

Bowman, L. C., & Brandone, A. C. (2024). Neural correlates of preschoolers’ passive-viewing false belief: Insights into continuity and change and the function of right temporoparietal activity in theory of mind development. Developmental Science, e13530. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13530Brandone, A. C. (2024). Children’s understanding of COVID-19: Acquiring knowledge about germs and contagion amidst a global pandemic. Cognitive Development, 70, 101433. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2024.101433Brandone, A. C. & Stout, W. (2024). Mentalistic and normative frameworks in children’s explanations of others’ behaviors. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14027 Brandone, A. C., & Stout, W. (2023). The origins of theory of mind in infant social cognition: Investigating longitudinal pathways from infant intention understanding and joint attention to preschool theory of mind. Journal of Cognition and Development, 24(3), 375-396. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2022.2146117Osterhaus, C., Brandone, A. C., Vosniadou, S., Nicolopoulou, A. (2021). Editorial: The emergence and development of scientific thinking during the early years: Basic processes and supportive contexts. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 629384. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.629384Stout, W., Karahuta, E., Laible, D., & Brandone, A. C. (2021). A longitudinal study of the differential social-cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors. Infancy, 26(2), 271-290. http://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12381Brandone, A. C., Stout, W., & Moty, K. (2020). Intentional action processing across the transition to crawling: Does the experience of self-locomotion impact infants’ understanding of intentional actions? Infant Behavior and Development, 60, 101470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101470Brandone, A. C., Stout, W., & Moty, K. (2019). Triadic interactions support infants’ emerging understanding of intentional actions. Developmental Science, 23, 12880. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12880Brandone, A. C., & Klimek, B. (2018). The developing theory of mental state control: Changes in beliefs about the controllability of emotion from elementary school through adulthood. Journal of Cognition and Development, 19(5), 509-531. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2018.1520711Brandone, A. C. (2017). Changes in beliefs about category homogeneity and variability across childhood. Child Development, 88(3), 846-866. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12616Brandone, A. C. (2015). Infants’ social and motor experience and the emerging understanding of intention. Developmental Psychology, 51(4), 512-523. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038844Brandone, A. C., Gelman, S. A., & Hedglen, J. (2015). Young children’s intuitions about the truth conditions and implications of novel generics and quantified statements. Cognitive Science, 39(4), 711-738. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12176Rhodes, M. & Brandone, A. C. (2014). Three-year-olds’ theories of mind in actions and words. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 5, 263. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00263Brandone, A. C., Horwitz, S., Wellman, H. M., Aslin, R.N. (2014). Infants’ goal anticipations during failed and successful reaching actions. Developmental Science, 17(1), 23-34. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12095Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2013). Generic language use reveals domain differences in young children’s expectations about animal and artifact categories. Cognitive Development, 28(1), 63-75. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2012.09.002Brandone, A. C., Cimpian, A., Leslie, S. J., & Gelman, S. A. (2012). Do lions have manes? For children, generics are about kinds rather than quantities. Child Development, 83(2), 423-433. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01708.xCimpian, A., Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2010). Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications. Cognitive Science, 34(8), 1452-1482. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01126.xCimpian, A., Gelman, S. A., & Brandone, A. C. (2010). Theory-based considerations influence the interpretation of generic sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(2), 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960903025227Gelman, S. A., & Brandone, A. C. (2010). Fast-mapping placeholders: Using words to talk about kinds. Language Learning & Development, 6(3), 223-240. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2010.484413Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2009). Differences in preschoolers’ and adults’ use of generics about animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide. Cognition, 110(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.08.005Brandone, A. C., & Wellman, H. M. (2009). You can’t always get what you want: Infants understand failed goal-directed actions. Psychological Science, 20(1), 85-91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02246.x

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