Using the dynamics of children's reaching to examine the role of inhibitory control in social cognitive development

Numerous studies in cognitive development have examined the relation between children's developing inhibitory control and their social cognition, including false belief, selective trust, and children's understanding of fairness norms. This research typically finds correlations between performance on inhibitory control measures and developmental milestones in social cognitive development, such as success on false belief measures, actively recognizing deceptive agents, and rejecting advantageous inequities. These studies, however, do not describe the role of inhibitory control as children are making these social cognitive inferences. We use reach trajectory tracking-a method commonly used with adults-to isolate the role of distinct inhibitory control mechanisms as children make such inferences. After describing this method, we present three case studies that describe how different inhibitory mechanisms are involved in understanding others' false beliefs, selective learning from human versus nonhuman stimuli, and making inferences about fair resource distributions. Taken together, these studies suggest that different inhibitory mechanisms relate to social evaluations about other people as opposed to evaluations of the information generated by others. Further, reach trajectory tracking offers a natural way of studying the role of inhibitory control in cognitive development, as children are making decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).