This research tests whether analogical learning is present before language comprehension. Three-month-old infants were habituated to a series of analogous pairs, instantiating either the "same" relation (e.g., AA, BB, etc.) or the "different" relation (e.g., AB, CD, etc.), and then tested with further exemplars of the…

Children in two studies were shown a sequence of pictorial paired associates for study. They were subsequently tested for their recognition memory of these items plus an additional four new items that could be recognized if the child engaged in a reasoning-by-exclusion strategy. (JMB)

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…

Experimental results indicated that verbal intelligence was the best predictor of childrens' overall performance on a paired-associate learning task. Teachers' ratings provided a surprising degree of predictive efficiency for abstract recall which was redundant with verbal intelligence. (Author/JAC)