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This research investigates 3- and 5-year-olds' relative fairness in distributing small collections of even or odd numbers of more or less desirable candies, either with an adult experimenter or between two dolls. The authors compare more than 200 children from around the world, growing up in seven highly contrasted cultural and economic contexts, from rich and poor urban areas, to small-scale traditional and rural communities. Across cultures, young children tend to optimize their own gain, not showing many signs of self-sacrifice or generosity. Already by 3 years of age, self-optimizing in distributive justice is based on perspective taking and rudiments of mind reading. By 5 years, overall, children tend to show more fairness in sharing. What varies across cultures is the magnitude of young children's self-interest. More fairness (less self-interest) in distributive justice is evident by children growing up in small-scale urban and traditional societies thought to promote more collective values.

Over the past 20 years, developmental psychologists have shown considerable interest in the onset of a theory of mind, typically marked by children's ability to pass false-belief tasks. In Western cultures, children pass such tasks around the age of 5 years, with variations of the tasks producing small changes in the age at which they are passed. Knowing whether this age of transition is common across diverse cultures is important to understanding what causes this development. Cross-cultural studies have produced mixed findings, possibly because of varying methods used in different cultures. The present study used a single procedure to measure false-belief understanding in five cultures: Canada, India, Peru, Samoa, and Thailand. With a standardized procedure, we found synchrony in the onset of mentalistic reasoning, with children crossing the false-belief milestone at approximately 5 years of age in every culture studied. The meaning of this synchrony for the origins of mental-state understanding is discussed.

The early development of explorarory behavior was studied. One study documents changes in free exploration of infants aged from 2 to 5 months. Another compares 3-and 4-5 month-olds when manipulating and exploring an object in the light or in the dark (no visual control over exploration). The third study compares multimodal exploration in 3-and 4-month-olds when presented with two different objects varying in multiple properties. Results show that significant changes occur between 2 and 5 months, relative to spontaneous multimodal exploration of a novel object. Object exploration becomes increasingly multimodal. Bimanual coordination is first linked to the oral system, later reorganized in reference to vision when fingering emerges by 4 months. Manipulation in 3-montholds is shown to be object-dependent. Factors controlling early object manipulation and functional changes in manual action prior to 6 months of age are discussed. When young infants are in an alert and quiet state, they display behaviors that are "exploratory" in nature because they appear to be primarily oriented toward bringing sense organs into various relations with objects in the environment. Newborns show elements of reaching with arms and hands toward an object moving close to them (Hofsten, 1982). Young infants track objects moving in their field of view with both eyes and head (Bullinger, 1984). From birth, they orient their heads in the direction of a sound source (Clifton, Morrongiello, Kulig, & Dowd, 1981; Muir & Field, 1979) and appear to selectively orient (root) their mouths in the direction of a familiar odor (Macfarlane, 1975). Contrary to the view that babies are passive spectators bombarded with stimulation, these observations indicate that from the earliest age infants are actors and, in particular, explorers of their environment. From a theoretical point of view, it is relevant to approach early behavior as involving action systems with specific adaptative functions like communication, locomotion, consumption, and exploration (Reed, 1982). Indeed, the active search for information is a basic motive-among others-guiding behavior from birth (E. J. Gibson & Spelke, 1983). Recent progress in the study of early action development shows that perceptual and motor aspects of behavior are closely intertwined, perception and action appearing as Support for the author was made possible by the Swiss National Scientific Research Foundation (FNRS) Fellowship No. 81.082-083. I would like to express my appreciation to E. S. Spelke, at Cornell University, in whose laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania the research was conducted. I thank A. Fogel at the University of Utah for his insights and advice on data analysis. 1 also thank S. J. Senders for his help in scoring, R. K. Clifton and N. A. Myers at the University of Massachusetts for their comments on a draft of this article, and H. L. Pick and the two reviewers for their constructive comments. Finally, 1 would like to express my gratitude to all of the parents and infants who participate...

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