Developmental changes in consistency of preferential feeling for peers and objects around age four
1Department of Culture and Psychology, Faculty of Human Studies, Seisen Jogakuin College, Nagano, Japan. iuehara@seisen-jc.ac.jp
Psychological Reports
|April 14, 2004
Summary
Young children develop stable peer impressions after age four. Before this, their preferences for friends fluctuate, unlike their consistent liking for objects.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Science
- Social Cognition
Background:
- Forming stable impressions of others relies on inferring mental states and episodic memory.
- These cognitive abilities mature around age four, suggesting a developmental shift in social understanding.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the age at which children form consistent mental images of their peers.
- To determine if developmental changes around age four impact the formation of stable social preferences.
Main Methods:
- Examined the temporal consistency of peer preferences in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds over three weekly sessions.
- Compared children's preferences for peers with their preferences for nonhuman objects (playthings).
Main Results:
- Three-year-olds showed inconsistent peer preferences, often naming different friends or unrelated items weekly.
- Four- and five-year-olds demonstrated significantly more temporal consistency in their stated peer preferences.
- Three-year-olds exhibited stable preferences for objects, indicating their inconsistency was specific to social relationships.
Conclusions:
- Children under four lack stable mental representations of individual peers, unlike their consistent object preferences.
- The development of stable peer impressions appears linked to cognitive maturation around age four, particularly in theory of mind and episodic memory.
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