Humans perceptually extract quantity information from our environments, be it from simple stimuli in isolation, or from relational magnitudes formed by taking ratios of pairs of simple stimuli. Some have proposed that these two types of magnitude are processed by a common system, whereas others have proposed separate systems. To test these…

Two experiments examined conditional discrimination in 4- to 6-year-olds. Children learned to choose one of two objects (e.g., circle) when the background was, say, red and to choose the other object (e.g., triangle) when the background was, say, blue. Awareness was assessed and interpreted as a marker of relational processing. In Experiment 1,…

One hundred and sixty subjects from five age levels ranging from 3 to 20 years compared photographs of dogs (e.g., two different Great Danes or a Great Dane and a Doberman pinscher) and judged whether they were similar or different. (Author/MP)

Age and condition (either constancy-relevant or variability-relevant) interact, with the youngest group in the constancy-relevant condition performing most poorly on concept identification tasks. (MH)

Results indicated the following: unitary stimuli were easier to encode; partitioned stimuli were easier to recode; recoding was much more difficult than encoding; extended training improved performance; second graders were slightly better at encoding and much better at recoding than were kindergarten children. (Author/DB)

Two experiments investigated the role of children's spontaneous conceptual "biases" in pictorial discrimination learning. The results suggested that such biases may serve either to facilitate or to interfere with discrimination learning. Moreover, in each experiment, age by treatment interactions revealed that in comparison to the behavior of…

Two experiments examined the determinants of children's belief or disbelief of statements made to them by other children. In both, the personal characteristics of the child transmitting the message were varied against message type and age of child receiving the message; transmitter characteristics were relative age and social dominance. (RH)

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…

Preschool children between 3 and 5 1/2 years of age participated in a learning task in which a conditional relational problem was presented in either a blocked or random series. Prior training on the components of the task was also varied. (BD)

Forty elementary children (six and nine year olds) and 20 college students were required to discriminate identical pairs of visual stimuli from mirror images. It was hypothesized that a key factor in performance would be the extent to which orientation was a functionally significant attribute of the stimuli. (Author/MP)

Studies the effects of perceptual salience on performance in problems requiring the coordination of information. Subjects were groups of children, younger adults, and older adults. For each of the age groups, those problems containing the most salient information were solved faster and more accurately than problems containing the least salient…

Spatial egocentrism and its relationships to discrimination ability and communicative egocentrism were investigated in a sample of 80 adult males from a single institutional setting. Significant effects of order of task presentation indicated that the experimental procedure influenced performance on the spatial and communicative egocentrism and…