This experiment was designed to test whether paired objects described as interacting through movement are more memorable to young children than the same objects described as alike in structure or color. Drawings of eight familiar objects were presented in unfamiliar combinations to forty-five 4-year-old subjects. Objects were described as…

Two experiments investigated why perceptual pretraining facilitates children's performance on concept problems involving a nonpreferred relevant dimension and preferred irrelevant dimensions. (JMB)

Object substitution masking (OSM) is said to occur when a perceptual object is hypothesized that is mismatched by subsequent sensory evidence, leading to a new hypothesized object being substituted for the first. For example, when a brief target is accompanied by a longer lasting display of nonoverlapping mask elements, reporting of target…

This study had two major purposes: to examine the effects of dimensional salience upon the learning of conjunction and disjunction rules, and to investigate an alternative to the prevailing cognitive-change accounts of developmental differences in multidimensional problem solving. The relative salience of each of four stimulus dimensions (form,…

Examines how children's responses to questions about object terms varied across objects and the degree to which children specified common and conventional values for different object dimensions. (HOD)

Children's use of the middle concept was assessed in two developmental studies. Experiment 1, with kindergarten through fifth-grade students, showed marked improvement in the mastery of the middle concept across elementary grades. In Experiment 2, discrimination pretraining with two nonoverlapping stimulus sets transferred to the novel test…

In three studies, we investigated to what extent a geometrical representation in a psychological space succeeds in predicting typicality in animal, natural food and artifact concepts and whether contrast categories contribute to the prediction. In Study 1, we compared the predictive value of a family resemblance-based prototype model with a…

The episodic buffer component of working memory is assumed to play a role in the binding of features into chunks. A series of experiments compared memory for arrays of colors or shapes with memory for bound combinations of these features. Demanding concurrent verbal tasks were used to investigate the role of general attentional processes,…

This study indicated that the dimensions of the configuration provided by INDSCAL multidimensional scaling are psychologically relevant to learning the concept of artistic style and that sensitivity to these dimensions, as measured by INDSCAL subject weights, can predict important individual differences in responses to another group of stimuli.…

This study was designed as the first in a series of inquiries to investigate the use of multidimensional scaling techniques for observing and measuring underlying dimensions commonly perceived by viewers. Following a preliminary study to select photographs, 15 university students aged 19 to 45 were presented with stimuli consisting of 34 colored…