A total of 12 three, four, five, seven, and nine year olds and 12 adult control subjects were asked 20 questions about two exemplars of each of 16 categories of animate beings and inanimate objects. Children's responses indicated that animism is not a pervasive phenomenon and does not appear to be the most primitive mode of conceptualization.…

Examines the development of a general event representation and the relationship between general and specific event memories among kindergarten children who were interviewed about the school-day routine four times during the first three months of school. (Author/RH)

The normative rule began to predominate at age 10 and was the only rule employed by 13-year-olds. In contrast, almost all 7-year-olds simplified the equalization task to an ordinal level. Four different nonalgebraic rules were identified. Neither young children's tendency to simplify nor older children's capacity to quantify could be detected in…

Four experiments investigated three- and four-year-old children's knowledge of projective size-distance and projective shape-orientation relationships. Results indicated that preschool children's understanding of these relationships seems at least partly cognitive rather than wholly perceptive, providing further evidence for the acquisition of…

The purpose of present experiments with subjects approximately three, five, and seven years of age was to provide additional evidence for the obviousness of the generative transmission principle and to provide initial evidence for the secondary principles of absence and facility. Empirical support was found for each of these selection principles,…

A theory of the assignment of moral responsibility and punishment for harm was tested with 5- to 11-year-old children. Results indicated sophisticated use of moral concepts from 5 years. Developmental trends suggested increasing sensitivity to these concepts, greater tolerance for harm doing, and more emphasis on restitution than punishment.…

Maternal involvement effects on symbolic play development in toddlers were investigated. Sixteen mother-child dyads were observed at bimonthly intervals in a free-play setting during the period from 20 to 28 months of age. The complexity and length of play episodes increased when the mother was available to play with the child. (Author/BN)

Examines children's conceptions of parental authority. A total of 120 children were interviewed and asked to evaluate social events (stealing, family chores, friendship choice) pertaining to restraint of behavior and maintenance of parental rule systems. Results suggest that children's notions of authority are heterogeneous with respect to the…

Acquisition of sentient-nonsentient distinction in 48 children between four- and seven-years-of-age occurred later than animate-inanimate distinction. The children's use of naturalistic or nonnaturalistic explanations depended on the logical nature of events in which objects were involved rather than familiarity with objects themselves. Ability to…

Findings obtained from 90 first- through fifth-grade children indicate that children grasp the direct relationships between speed and distance and between duration and distance before they grasp the inverse relationship between speed and duration--a finding which may represent a general principle of cognitive development. (Author/RH)

Young children and adolescents regarded the crossing of stereotyped gender boundaries as more wrong and expressed a greater personal commitment to sex-role regularity than did children in middle childhood. Although young children and adolescents viewed gender differentiations as an aspect of psychological-personal identity, their conceptions of…

Tests the distinction between inferring new categories on the basis of property information (predicted to be difficult) and inferring new properties on the basis of category information (predicted to be easier) among 57 preschool children. (HOD)

Examines developmental change in processes used to retrieve information from semantic memory. Twenty-nine 8-, 12-, and 21-year-olds were asked to name as many animals and pieces of furniture as they could in separate 7-minute intervals. Results suggested that information in semantic memory changes with age, but that retrieval processes do not.…

By varying task requirements within a common procedural framework, four experiments established conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life. Overall, results suggested that even four- and five-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all "inanimate objects" are not. (Author/RH)

Examines developmental change in 4- 7- and 10-month-old infants' perceptions of correlations among attributes to determine whether relational information plays a role in abilities ranging from the perception and recognition of a simple pattern to the formation of a category. (HOD)