Educators often use concrete objects to help children understand mathematics concepts. However, findings on the effectiveness of concrete objects are mixed. The present study examined how two factors--perceptual richness and established knowledge of the objects--combine to influence children's counting performance. In two experiments, preschoolers…

This study provides experimental evidence for automatic, relationship-specific social information processing in 13-year-old adolescents. Photographs of participants' liked, disliked, and unknown peers were used as primes in an affective priming task with happy and angry facial expression probes and in a hypothetical vignette task. For the…

Investigated two- to four-year-old children's sensitivity to perceptual and normative standards of comparison and their responses when standards conflict. Even the youngest children were capable of using normative and perceptual standards and could apply different standards of comparison when judging size. (RJC)

Perceptual and categorical similarity were varied independently in a concept-matching task administered to young children. Perceptual similarity proved to be the primary determinant of difficulty level. Superordinate and basic matches were equally difficult. When perceptual resemblance was minimal, most children were unable to recognize matches at…

Studies children's inductive inferences in order to investigate the development of the expectation that members of a category share unforeseen properties. Results indicate that preschoolers drew more inferences based on category membership than on perceptual appearances. (PCB)

Investigates the ability of four-, seven-, and ten-month-old infants to perceive and base novelty responses on correlations among perceptual attributes in a category-like context. In a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, ten-month-old infants clearly responded on the basis of the correlation among attributes, while four- and seven-month-old…

A developmental progression in 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children's use of strategies for gathering information was revealed in a study involving partial recall, total recall, and similarity/difference judgments. When subjects chose stimuli for exposure from an array, older children showed more ability to match strategy to task demands. Strategy…

When presented visual patterns for 100-msec followed by a 100-msec patterned masker at intervals of 0, 250, 500, and 2,000 msec after the offset of the stimulus, only infants in the 2,000-msec stimulus-masker interval condition significantly fixated a novel stimulus longer than a familiar stimulus. Results suggest visual processing in infants is…

Newborn infants' fixation of a graduated series of visual stimuli significantly differed in the absence and presence of white-noise bursts. Relative to the no-sound condition, sound resulted in the infants' tendency to look more at the low-intensity visual stimulus and less at the high- intensity visual stimulus. (Author/DB)

This study tested the assimilation of an auditory-visual stimulus configuration in 32 infants aged 15 to 16 weeks. The infants' discrimination of matched and mismatched auditory-visual stimuli indicated that infants by 4 months of age are capable of constructing bimodal schemata. (JMB)

Examined the ability of 1-year olds to remember the location of nonvisible targets. Found that infants were able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and to code its distance and direction with respect to themselves or the larger framework. Difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks was associated with cognitive complexity and…

This study examined whether 16-month-old walking infants take the material composition of a handrail into account when assessing its effectiveness as a tool to augment balance. Infants were encouraged to cross from one platform to another via bridges of various widths (10, 20, 40cm) with either a wobbly (foam or latex) or a wooden handrail…

Preschool, first-grade, and fifth-grade children served as Ss in 2 experiments designed to test the developmental hypothesis that memorizing and perceiving are functionally undifferentiated for the young child, with deliberate memorization only gradually emerging as a separate and distinctive form of cognitive encounter with external data.…