Janet J. Boseovski

My research program is aimed at understanding the nature of social judgments and decision making in early to late childhood (i.e., 3- to 12-year- old children). My main interests converge on three central questions: (a) How do children decide whether other people are nice, mean, smart, and/or capable? (b) How do children harness the characteristics of other people (e.g., their knowledge status, personality traits, and cultural privilege) to learn new information about the world? (c) How do age-related cognitive skills and biases impact children’s social judgments and behavior? I also have secondary interests in the development of theory of mind (mental state reasoning), executive functioning, and children’s learning in informal settings.

There are 20 included publications by Janet J. Boseovski :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Children’s trait and emotion attributions in socially ambiguous and unambiguous situations. 2013 2715 Children's attributions about story characters in ambiguous and unambiguous social situations were assessed. One hundred and forty-four 6–7-year-olds and 10–11-year-olds heard about actors who slighted a recipient intentionally or for an undetermined...
Children’s use of frequency information for trait categorization and behavioral prediction 2006 2908 Two experiments examined young children’s use of behavioral frequency information to make behavioral predictions and global personality attributions. In Experiment 1, participants heard about an actor who behaved positively or negatively toward 1 or ...
The development of executive function in early childhood 2003 51109 According to the Cognitive Complexity and Control (CCC) theory, the development of executive function can be understood in terms of age-related increases in the maximum complexity of the rules children can formulate and use when solving problems. Thi...
Evaluating and Approaching a Strange Animal: Children's Trust in Informant Testimony 2013 1795 This study examined 3- to 7-year-old children's reliance on informant testimony to learn about a novel animal. Sixty participants were given positive or negative information about an Australian marsupial from an informant described as a maternal figu...
Evidence of "rose-colored glasses": An examination of the positivity bias in young children's personality judgments. 2010 3957 Young children exhibit a positivity bias in their judgment of personality traits, wherein they attend to or process information selectively to maintain optimistic views of the self and others. In addition to its theoretical relevance for developing a...
Expertise in unexpected places: Children’s acceptance of information from gender counter-stereotypical experts 2016 1573 The current study examined children’s willingness to accept novel information from expert informants with nontraditional gender role interests. Four- to 8-year-olds heard conflicting information about traditionally feminine or masculine domains from ...
Goal neglect and working memory capacity in 4- to 6-year-old children 2010 2252 Goal neglect is the phenomenon of failing to execute the momentary demands of a task despite understanding and being able to recall the task instructions. Successful goal maintenance is more likely to occur in adults with high working memory capacity...
The hierarchical competing systems model provides a process account of social decision making 2013 876 We applaud Richardson, Mulvey, and Killen’s [2012] application of the hierarchical competing systems model (HCSM) to models of social decision making. The HCSM is a framework of the development of executive function that was formulated to account for...
Integration of behavioral frequency and intention information in young children’s trait attributions. 2013 2587 Two experiments examined three- to six-year-olds' use of frequency and intention information to make trait attributions and behavioral predictions. In experiment 1, participants were told a story about an actor who behaved positively once or four tim...
Integration of Behavioral Frequency and Intention Information in Young Children's Trait Attributions 2013 1624 Two experiments examined three- to six-year-olds' use of frequency and intention information to make trait attributions and behavioral predictions. In experiment 1, participants were told a story about an actor who behaved positively once or four tim...
‘It’s all good’: Children’s personality attributions after repeated success and failure in peer and computer interactions 2009 3676 The present study examined children’s use of behavioural outcome information to make personality attributions in social and non-social contexts. One hundred and twenty-eight 3- to 6-year-olds were told about a story actor who engaged in primarily suc...
Reviewing the Development of Self- Concept: Implications for an Enhanced Model 2018 1822 [2017-2018 UNCG University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund Grant Winner] According to the multiple self-aspects framework, self-concept structure is highly influenced by overlap between self-aspects, and affective spillover may occur when affec...
Role of Expertise, Consensus, and Informational Valence in Children's Performance Judgments 2016 1422 Two experiments examined the role of expertise, consensus, and informational valence on children's acceptance of informant testimony about the quality of work produced by a target child. In Experiment 1, 96 4- to 5.9-year-olds and 6- to 8-year-olds w...
Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? Neglect of consensus information in young children’s personality judgments 2008 2463 The present study examined the use of consensus information in early childhood. Ninety-six three- to six-year-olds watched a demonstration that depicted the positive or negative behavior of one or several actors toward a recipient (low vs. high conse...
Self-Reflection and the Cognitive Control of Behavior: Implications for Learning 2008 5624 In this article, we suggest that self-reflection and self-control--studied under the rubric of "executive function" (EF)—have the potential to transform the way in which learning occurs, allowing for the relatively rapid emergence of new behaviors. W...
Theory of Mind and Children's Trait Attributions about Average and Typically Stigmatized Peers 2015 1759 Previous research indicates that children hold negative beliefs about peers with foreign accents, physical disabilities, and people who are obese. The current study examined skills associated with individual differences in children's social judgement...
Trust in testimony about strangers: Young children prefer reliable informants who make positive attributions 2012 2035 Young children have been described as critical consumers of information, particularly in the domain of language learning. Indeed, children are more likely to learn novel words from people with accurate histories of object labeling than with inaccurat...
Use it or lose it: Examining preschoolers’ difficulty in maintaining and executing a goal 2007 3194 Individuals with low working memory capacity (e.g. preschoolers) are more prone to goal neglect, or a failure to execute a goal even though it is understood. We examined the role of goal neglect in performance on the Dimensional Change Card Sort by i...
Video reminders in a representational change task: Memory for cues but not beliefs or statements 2001 2774 Two experiments investigated the effect of video reminders on 3-year-olds’ performance in a representational change task. In Experiment 1, children in a video support condition viewed videotapes of their initial incorrect statements about a misleadin...
Young Children’s Ability to Use Ordinal Labels in a Spatial Search Task 2015 602 The use and understanding of ordinal terms (e.g., “first” and “second”) is a developmental milestone that has been relatively unexplored in the preschool age range. In the present study, 4- and 5-year-olds watched as a reward was placed in one of thr...