Circumscribed interests are a fascinating and an understudied phenomenon in some individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Research in this area is likely to contribute to our understanding of ASDs and to advancing developmental knowledge on learning processes used to adapt to the demands of everyday social life. This study reports on a survey of special interests in 96 children and adolescents with higher functioning ASD. The survey included listing of up to three special interests for each child, and the rating of level of interference of a given interest upon children's activities when by themselves and when in contact with family members, peers, and other adults. This information was collected for both preschool and elementary school years. Special interests were classified into eight categories in terms of their nature (rather than topic), which included the ways through which the interest was manifest and pursued. Results indicated that circumscribed interests (a) are the norm rather than the exception in this population (75% and 88% of the sample for the younger and the older age periods, respectively), (b) most frequently involve verbal learning and memorization of facts (65% and 81% for the younger and the older age periods, respectively), (c) often involve an element of interest in letters and numbers in the preschool years (35% of the sample), (d) greatly interfere with activities pursued by oneself or with others, and (e) level of interference is predictive of lower social and communicative adaptive behavior later in life. Given the ubiquity of circumscribed interests in this population, their verbal nature, and the passion that children with ASD invest in these pursuits, we suggest the need for studies that will trace the longitudinal course of learning profiles from early childhood and possible interventions that may address these areas.

Individuals can infer what others are likely to know by clustering knowledge according to common goals, common topics, or common underlying principles. Although young children are sensitive to underlying principles, that manner of clustering might not prevail when other viable means are presented. Two studies examined how a sample of 256 children at ages 5, 7, 9, and 11 decide how to generalize another person's knowledge when goals, topics, and principles are put in conflict. In both studies, younger children preferred generalizing according to goals and topics, whereas older children preferred clustering based on principles related to disciplines. The most naturalistic ways of envisioning how knowledge is clustered in the minds of others therefore seems to change significantly during the elementary school years.

Over the last 15 years, researchers have been increasingly interested in understanding the nature and development of children’s selective trust. Three meta‐analyses were conducted on a total of 51 unique studies (88 experiments) to provide a quantitative overview of 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children’s selective trust in an informant based on the informant’s epistemic or social characteristics, and to examine the relation between age and children’s selective trust decisions. The first and second meta‐analyses found that children displayed medium‐to‐large pooled effects in favor of trusting the informant who was knowledgeable or the informant with positive social characteristics. Moderator analyses revealed that 4‐year‐olds were more likely to endorse knowledgeable informants than 3‐year‐olds. The third meta‐analysis examined cases where two informants simultaneously differed in their epistemic and social characteristics. The results revealed that 3‐year‐old children did not selectively endorse informants who were more knowledgeable but had negative social characteristics over informants who were less knowledgeable but had positive social characteristics. However, 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds consistently prioritized epistemic cues over social characteristics when deciding who to trust. Together, these meta‐analyses suggest that epistemic and social characteristics are both valuable to children when they evaluate the reliability of informants. Moreover, with age, children place greater value on epistemic characteristics when deciding whether to endorse an informant’s testimony. Implications for the development of epistemic trust and the design of studies of children’s selective trust are discussed.

Individuals who believe intelligence is malleable (a growth mindset) are better able to bounce back from failures than those who believe intelligence is immutable. Event-related potential (ERP) studies among adults suggest this resilience is related to increased attention allocation to errors. Whether this mechanism is present among young children remains unknown, however. We therefore evaluated error-monitoring ERPs among 123 school-aged children while they completed a child-friendly go/no-go task. As expected, higher attention allocation to errors (indexed by larger error positivity, Pe) predicted higher post-error accuracy. Moreover, replicating adult work, growth mindset was related to greater attention to mistakes (larger Pe) and higher post-error accuracy. Exploratory moderation analyses revealed that growth mindset increased post-error accuracy for children who did not attend to their errors. Together, these results demonstrate the combined role of growth mindset and neural mechanisms of attention allocation in bouncing back after failure among young children.

Adults use the terms revolting, gross, and disgusting to describe entities and actions, such as feces, rotten food, and sex with corpses, which elicit a certain visceral response. But adults also apply such expressions to certain sociomoral transgressions, such as cheating on one's spouse or stealing from the poor. Here, the authors explore whether young children associate disgust with physical and moral events by endorsing either verbal or facial expressions of disgust. Results indicate that children in Grades K, 2, and 4 (N = 167) label moral violations "disgusting" more often than nondisgusting physical acts or neutral negative acts but less often than physically disgusting acts. Likewise, children associate facial expressions of disgust with moral violations. These findings are discussed in the context of different theories about the relationship between physical disgust and moral disgust.