The role of categorical versus associative relations in 5-, 7-, and 11-year-old children's true and false memories was examined using the Deese--Roediger--McDermott (DRM) paradigm and categorized lists of pictures or words with or without category labels as primes. For true items, recall increased with age and categorized lists were better…

Four experiments examined the development of negative priming (NP) in 3-5-year-old children using as a measure of children's executive function (EF) the dimensional change card sort (DCCS) task. In the NP version of the DCCS, the values of the sorting dimension that is relevant during the preswitch phase are removed during the postswitch phase.…

Although prior research clearly shows that toddlers have difficulty learning from video, the basis for their difficulty is unknown. In the 2 current experiments, the effect of social feedback on 2-year-olds' use of information from video was assessed. Children who were told "face to face" where to find a hidden toy typically found it, but children…

In order to investigate the relationship between the development of justice (moral) conceptions and the development of mathematical and physical (logical) conceptions, 50 children(ages 4-8) were administered a "positive justice" interview and five of Piaget's concrete-operational mathematical and physical tasks. (Author/CS)

A series of tests was designed for 24-, 30-, and 36-month-olds to measure their ability to apply various gender labels to the appropriate sexes, their capacity to place themselves in their own gender category, and their usage of labels to guide preference behavior. (Author/CS)

In an attempt to examine the generalizability of the Kendler S-R mediational model of reversal-shift behavior, 60 third-grade children were classified as either verbal mediators or nonmediators on the basis of their performance on an optional-shift discrimination problem. The children's performances were then evaluated on three tasks. (Author/CS)

Emotion regulation cannot be temporally distinguished from emotion in the brain, but activation patterns in prefrontal cortex appear to mediate cognitive control during emotion episodes. Frontal event-related potentials (ERPs) can tap cognitive control hypothetically mediated by the anterior cingulate cortex, and developmentalists have used these…

The prefrontal cortex modulates executive control processes and structurally matures throughout adolescence. Consistent with these events, prefrontal functions that demand high levels of executive control may mature later than those that require working memory but decreased control. To test this hypothesis, adolescents (9 to 20 years old)…

The relative strength of mastery motivation and need for approval was tested in subjects, ages 4 and 10. Mastery motivation was of major importance to the older children, particularly the boys. Contrary to prediction, approval was not of major importance to the young children. Need for approval was important for girls, but not boys. (Author/CS)

Sinclair-de Zwart's findings on relationships between cognitive and linguistic development were compared with data gathered in Australia from 162 first-, second-, and third-grade Greek-English bilinguals (tested in both languages) and 136 English monoglots in the same classroom. (Author/CS)

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

This study assessed the relation between mother mental state language and child desire language and emotion understanding in 15--24-month-olds. At both times point, mothers described pictures to their infants and mother talk was coded for mental and nonmental state language. Children were administered 2 emotion understanding tasks and their mental…

Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)

Black and white kindergarten and second-grade children were tested for accuracy of detection and recognition of orientation and location changes in pictures of real-world and geometric figures. The purpose was to test children's ability to detect and remember objects in a visual display. (Author/CS)