This study attempts to assess differences in the three aspects of cognitive complexity--differentiation, discrimination, and integration--as functions of information about and interest in the relevant domain. The two groups of subjects consisted of 20 members of a local sports car club and an equal number from a local garden club. Each group had…

This study examined children's use of category information as a discrimination cue to avoid intrusions in recall and false alarms in recognition of items outside given categories. Forty-eight children in grades 1 and 4 were administered one of three conditions of a recognition task in which all study words were members of one of two familiar…

This document describes the Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) model of concept formation. According to the CLD analysis, a single concept is learned in the following successive levels of attainment: concrete, identity, classification, and formal. The four levels are considered applicable to concepts that are defined (or could be defined)…

This paper presents a study of children's abilities to make inferences about an actor's plans and to use these inferences to assign blame and praise. Preschool children were presented with eight stories combining good and bad intentions with final outcomes that were either intended or accidental (foreseeable or unforeseeable side effects). Results…

The purpose of this study was to determine if children given spatial relationship training had learned a definition and/or conceptualization of "in front" which was limited to two distinctly different classes of objects functioning in a specific relationship. Twenty-one children who had completed the "in front" training were given three sets of…

The information processing terms "content" and "address" are used to describe structural differences between the constructs of individual identity and identity in the equivalence sense. In both cases a sameness relation is established in spite of specific differences. The resulting constructs of identity are known to be…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

This paper presents an overview of the knowledge afforded man from research into personality. Approaching his topic from a position valuing the study of persons from complementary psychological perspectives, the author attempts to derive some conclusion about human behavior and personality. He discusses the findings that there is basic continuity…

This study concerns children's understanding of spatial relationships and their expression in drawings and photographs. Sixty children (ages 5, 8, and 11) were asked to discriminate and reproduce three types of depth relationships in either drawings or photographs: enclosure, where a larger object is placed directly behind a smaller object;…

This study examines serial habituation in a sample of 54 infants aged 2, 3, and 4 months to determine whether age changes are partially a function of different "strategies" rather than simply different rates of habituation. The serial habituation hypothesis proposes that attention and habituation of attention proceed in order of the relative…

This study investigates the relationship between temporal organization and the rate at which discrimination-reversal learning mastery occurs within sixth-grade students. Subjects were 22 male and 30 female students from a predominantly white, middle class rural school. Temporal behavior was assessed with a task that had subjects reproduce standard…

This study was designed to investigate the effects of modeling or training with and without rule provision on the employment of strategies in solving four-dimensional, discrimination-learning problems. Subjects were 144 second and sixth-grade children from the New York City Public Schools. The blank-trial hypothesis testing paradigm was used. The…

One of the most important capacities which children employ when learning language is the capacity to generalize. A child who hears an utterance of a verbal expression while perceiving a particular object (or action, aspect, etc.) becomes normally able to apply the expression not only to this object but also to all those objects which, for him, are…

Sex typing among preschool children was investigated by means of a complete experimental design to test which factors maintain sex-typed behaviors, to test whether sex-typed behaviors are learned, and to reduce sex typing. The complete experimental design, it is maintained, allows investigators to focus on the consequences of sex typing rather…