Tested 4-month-olds' memory for surface feature and location information following brief occlusions. Found that when target objects were images of female faces or monochromatic asterisks, infants increased looking times following changes in identity or color but not changes in location or combinations of feature and location. When objects were…

Examined how developmental differences in perceptual and conceptual priming between 8 and 19 years coincide with differences between familiarity and recollective responses on explicit memory tests employing the Remember/Know paradigm. Found few age-group differences in perceptual priming following a levels-of-processing encoding manipulation. In…

Examined performance of over one hundred 6- to 10-year olds on three of each of the following tasks: processing speed, memory span, phonological skill, and articulation tasks assessing speed with which they could say familiar stimuli. Found that performance on span tasks was predicted by phonology and articulation tasks but not by age or…

Investigated children's representational ability as a cognitive factor underlying the suggestibility of their eyewitness memory. Found that the eyewitness memory of children lacking multirepresentational abilities or sufficient general memory abilities (most 3- and 4-year-olds) was less accurate than eyewitness memory of those with…

Research indicates that people do not spontaneously transfer prior clues to solve problems, even though the necessary information is available in memory. To investigate the effects of the symmetry between clue statements and problem statements on problem solving performance, subjects were asked to provide plausible explanations for five…

Concludes that strategies are not responsible for memory span development in children 7 through 13 years old. Running and fixed memory span tasks and a running probe task were administered to 38 children. The probe task showed age differences as great as with the fixed span task. Span was reduced by approximately half an item over all ages.…

Twenty preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared to matched peers on counting abilities. SLI children demonstrated knowledge of rules associated with counting but exhibited marked difficulty in counting objects. They showed difficulty with rote counting, displayed a limited repertoire of number terms, miscounted…

In order to determine whether non-Western children would show a memory deficit for contextually organized spatial ability, the performances of 30 Mayan and 30 American nine-year-olds on reconstruction of an organized three-dimensional miniature scene were examined. (MP)

Investigated developmental trends associated with the Deese/Roediger-McDermott false-memory effect, the role of distinctive information, and subjective experience of true/false memories. Found that 5-year-olds recalled more false memories than adults but no age differences in recognition of critical lures. Distinctive information reduced false…

In response to empirical evidence that suggests that children use more than one strategy in transitive inference tasks, an effort was made to model strategy development as it occurs under the dual constraints of a concept of order and task demands. In the model, when a task is presented, procedural memory is searched for a strategy that is…

An examination of the role of metacognitive thinking (a secondary level of understanding in which an individual shows knowledge of his/her own cognitive process and products) in the cognitive training of exceptional students is presented. (PHR)

Sentences were presented to adolescents with and without mental retardation, and their memory for the object nouns of the sentences was then tested under various conditions. Results indicate that differences in sentence processing between individuals with and without mental retardation may be a result of differences in generating integrated…

Examined three possible explanations for findings that infants detect textural discrepancies based on individual features more readily than on feature conjunctions. Found that none of the proposed factors could explain 5.5-month-olds' superior processing of featural over conjunction-based textural discrepancies. Findings suggest that in infancy,…