Four-year-olds were reliably accurate about movement potentials for the categories of mammals, nonmammalian animals, statues of animals, wheeled vehicles, and multipart, rigid objects. The three-year-olds' scores were significantly above chance in all categories but animals. Analyses showed that children were concerned about the cause of movement…

Study of suicide notes involved deduction of 50 protocol sentences that reflected aspects of Shneidman's formulations with regard to suicide. Independent judges noted incidence of contents corresponding to protocol sentences in notes left by 60 adult suicides. Age, but not sex, was found to be critical discriminating variable on several specific…

Investigates the perceptual basis of metaphor by asking 5-, 7-, and 10-year-old children and adults to pair and discuss films of natural objects, both stationary and moving. Concludes that motion information makes metaphoric similarity relatively easy to perceive and influences the form of descriptive metaphors. (Author/CB)

This study examined the extent to which actions of objects influence children's taxonomic categorization. Two types of action-based categories were examined: those in which the objects share similar actions; and those in which the objects have dissimilar actions. Perceptual features of the objects were dissimilar for all objects used in the study.…

A component analysis was used to assess the performance of 6-,9-, and 12 year-old children who heard a 36-word list and tried to recall it on two successive trials. (ST)

The Education Participation Scale was administered to 611 students enrolled in adult education courses at one college in the U. S., and results were compared to results from a similar study in New Zealand. There was some variation in expressed reasons for participation between different sex-age groupings. (Author/AG)

Whereas middle-aged individuals tended to group the entire stimulus array into piles of similar items, the elderly individuals grouped very much as young children do--arranging only a portion of the stimulus array into elaborate designs. (Authors)

Study concerned with the effects of procedural differences on the classification of geometrical stimuli. (Author)

Animistic responding was generally unrelated to logical classification ability or to analytic cognitive style. Results which found high levels of animistic thinking beyond adolescence do not support Piagetian theory. Adults may respond animistically because of emotional attachments which they have formed to certain meaningful physical objects.…

Examined 7- and 9-month-olds' ability to categorize cats and dogs as separate from one another. Found that both groups formed a cat category that included novel cats but excluded a dog and an eagle, and formed a dog category that included novel dogs and a novel cat but excluded an eagle. Results mirrored those of 3- to 4-month-olds with visual…

Second-, third-, and fourth-graders received five sort-recall trials for word lists. Results indicated that multiple strategy use increased with age; fourth graders who used more strategies had higher recall than those who used fewer; children at all ages showed substantial inter-trial variability in using multiple strategies; and the use of few…

Three experiments tested 3- and 4-year-olds' use of abstract principles to classify and label objects by shape or function. Findings indicated that 4-year-olds readily adopted either rule when instructed to match objects by shape or function, but 3-year-olds followed only the shape rule. Without a rule, 4-year-olds tended to match by shape unless…

Four-year-olds' and adults' inferences based on shared conceptual properties, category labels, and perceptual information were assessed in four experiments. Stimuli included novel and familiar animals. Found that children made attribute-based inductions as well as category-based inductions, and that perceptual similarity consistently influenced…

The developmental change from global toward dimensional classifications, usually observed in vision, was investigated in haptics with stimuli varying according to their size and roughness. Results indicated that, although more overall similarity classifications were observed in children than in adults, this kind of classification was never…

In three experiments, adults and 30-month-old children (1) selected a novel object as the referent for a novel term; (2) extended the new word to another exemplar; and (3) allowed the new word to preempt another novel label from applying to the just-named object. (BC)