One of the lawlike regularities of psychological science is that of developmental progression--an increase in sensorimotor, cognitive, and social functioning from childhood to adulthood. Here, we report a rare violation of this law, a developmental reversal in attention. In Experiment 1, 4­- to 5­- year ­olds (n = 34) and adults (n = 35) performed…

How do people learn categories and what changes with development? The current study attempts to address these questions by focusing on the role of attention in the development of categorization. In Experiment 1, participants (adults, 7-year-olds, and 4-year-olds) were trained with novel categories consisting of deterministic and probabilistic…

Does category representation change in the course of development? And if so, how and why? The current study attempted to answer these questions by examining category learning and category representation. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were trained with either a classification task or an inference task and their…

The effects of aging and IQ on performance were examined in 4 memory tasks: item recognition, associative recognition, cued recall, and free recall. For item and associative recognition, accuracy and the response time (RT) distributions for correct and error responses were explained by Ratcliff's (1978) diffusion model at the level of individual…

This study employed the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), version 7.0 (ESL/EFL) developed by Oxford (1990) to examine differences in language-learning strategy use. It focused on how learner factors such as gender, age, nationality, and proficiency level influence the choice of language-learning strategies. The participants were 75…