A longstanding and fundamental debate in developmental science is whether knowledge is acquired through domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To date, there exists no tool to determine whether experimental data support one theoretical approach or the other. In this article, we argue that the U- and N-shaped curves found in a number of…

Behavioral studies show that infants are capable of discriminating the number of objects or events in their environment, while also suggesting that number discrimination in infancy may be ratio-dependent. However, due to limitations of the dependent measures used with infant behavioral studies, the evidence for ratio dependence falls short of the…

Familiarized 6- and 8-month-olds with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. Found that only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. Results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the…

This document describes the Conceptual Learning and Development (CLD) model of concept formation. According to the CLD analysis, a single concept is learned in the following successive levels of attainment: concrete, identity, classification, and formal. The four levels are considered applicable to concepts that are defined (or could be defined)…

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…

This study attempted to determine the functional components of rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. When a discrimination list was given without rehearsal instructions, ability to discriminate situational frequencies predicted performance. Without rehearsal strategy, subjects' ability to discriminate between previous usage…

Research supported by a U.S. Public Health Service fellowship grant and by grant No. 01368-04 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Two experiments examined whether 40 infants would reenact what an adult did or intended to do: (1) infants observed an adult unsuccessfully attempt to complete 4 target acts; and (2) children observed a mechanical device tracing the adults' actions. Infants could infer adults' intentions and imitate target acts, suggesting that children can…

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)

The question of how children represent and use comparative or partially ordered information is examined. Two experiments tested a conjecture that a common representation, a linear order, underlies the processing of all comparatives. (Author/MS)

Reports on two studies during which 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children were interviewed about three different types of regularities or rules: social conventions, physical laws, and logical necessities. Shows that older children made more distinctions between social and nonsocial items than did younger children. (HOD)

This study investigates the relationship between temporal organization and the rate at which discrimination-reversal learning mastery occurs within sixth-grade students. Subjects were 22 male and 30 female students from a predominantly white, middle class rural school. Temporal behavior was assessed with a task that had subjects reproduce standard…