Assesses children's understanding of the impact of length, noise, age, and time on performance of three cognitive activities: memory, communication, and attention. Subjects were 18 preschool children and 18 first graders. (MP)

Examines the development of young children's analysis of spatial patterns--specifically, hierarchical letter and geometric forms. Suggests that although children as young as four years of age demonstrated substantial analytic competence, their ability to integrate the parts of the spatial array to form a coherent whole was weaker and more easily…

Reviews the literature on the role of self understanding, language, theory of mind, attachment security, and parental style in children's autobiographical memory development. Discusses evidence that social-cognitive factors appear to interact with parental style in producing children's first verbal memories. Emotional factors, such as attachment…

Examined whether speech rate is related to the amount recalled and if developmental increases in speech rate allow faster rehearsal with age, and hence, greater recall. Found that the group relationship was clear and replicable but that speech rates of individual children were not good predictors of those children's memory spans; age was found to…

Considers the role that students' approaches to learning play in summarizing text and learning from summarization. Discusses studies of two forms of summarization, one with the text available and one with the text removed after reading but before summarization. Reports that text-absent summarization facilitates deeper processing for students who…

Reviews research on the effect of stress hormones, particularly glucocorticoids, on the brain and early development. It describes the psychological and social processes that reduce stress hormone responses to threatening and painful procedures. Research on the cognitive and emotional effects of synthetic glucocorticoids is also discussed.…

A study of 172 male and 120 female college students with learning disabilities investigated interaction of gender and ability on cognitive, language, and achievement variables. Most measures were strongly related to general cognitive ability. Gender differences were found for general short-term memory on one cognitive measure and the…

Examines evidence that the research community studying infants' object concept and the community concerned with adult object-based attention have been studying the same natural kind. Maintains that the discovery that the object representations of young infants are the same as the object files of mid-level visual cognition has implications for both…

Two studies examined nutritional differences between home breakfasts and breakfasts served at preschool following School Breakfast Program guidelines and evaluated nutritional impact of program participation on 4-year olds' preacademic performance. Results indicated that breakfast intake was altered under school breakfast conditions. Performance…

Initial research on maternal reminiscing style established clear and consistent individual differences that vary along a dimension of maternal elaboration and that are related to children's developing autobiographical skills. More recent research has linked maternal elaborative reminiscing to strategic memory development, language and literacy…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) analyze the performance of monolingual children and adult second language (L2) learners in off-line and on-line tasks and compare their performance with that of adult monolinguals. They conclude that child first language (L1) processing is basically the same as adult L1 processing (the contiguity assumption), with…

This study examined the influence of children's emotion situation knowledge (EK) on their autobiographical memory ability at both group and individual levels. Native Chinese, Chinese immigrant, and European American 3-year-old children participated (N = 189). During a home visit, children recounted 2 personal memories of recent, 1-time events with…

This booklet provides an overview of stages and levels of cognitive development. Particular attention is given to language skills, the growth of understanding and memory, levels of thinking, altruism, and conscience. The importance of parents' influence on the development of their child's thinking abilities is emphasized. Nine resources that…

Human development has two different stories to tell. One describes the growth of the universal characteristics that are present in all human beings because humans possess a particular set of genes. Four examples of biologically prepared, universal characteristics in the psychological growth of children are the growth of memory, of moral sense and…

In two phases, this study examined age-related changes in children's knowledge about two familiar domains and how these domains are organized in permanent memory. Forty 5-year-olds and 40 7-year-olds from a small academic community generated exemplars from the animal and cartoon character domains and provided information about sets of animals and…