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…

Does valence play a role in children's sensitivity to and use of moral information in the service of selective learning? In the present experiment, we explored this question by presenting 3- to 5-year-old children with informants who behaved in ways consistent or inconsistent with sociomoral norms, such as helping a peer retrieve a toy or…

Three experiments are reported on behavioral inference in children of 3 to 5 years of age. In each experiment the children learned two separate sequences of behavior which they were required to put together in the final test stage in order to obtain a reward. (MS)

This paper presents a study of children's abilities to make inferences about an actor's plans and to use these inferences to assign blame and praise. Preschool children were presented with eight stories combining good and bad intentions with final outcomes that were either intended or accidental (foreseeable or unforeseeable side effects). Results…

This study of the effects of practice on children's perceptual judgments investigates the validity of the distinctive features hypothesis and the schemata hypothesis by comparing performance on discrimination tasks using familiar stimuli (letters of the alphabet) with a variety of transformations held constant over four massed practice conditions.…

Groups trained to compare the whole and subset improved in cue identification from negative instances; performance in the stimulus exposure group declined. (Authors)

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)

Study focuses on children aged 3 to 5 years from 3 London areas. Contrary to expectation, awareness of differences in skin color was not a simple function of age and contact with colored children and adults; no clear evidence of prejudiced thinking was found in the subjects studied. (RJ)

A sorting task was used to define concepts held by 120 children (4, 5, and 18 years old) as available and nonavailable. These concepts were then used at the appropriate age levels in a discrimination-learning task. After learning the discrimination, either a reversal or half-reversal shift was required. (MS)

Previous experiments with nursery school children have suggested that (1) subjects of preschool age do not verbalize during transfer learning or that (2) for these subjects, self-produced verbal cues have little influence on the learning process. To investigate the relative merits of these alternative positions, research was conducted among 80…

Sex typing among preschool children was investigated by means of a complete experimental design to test which factors maintain sex-typed behaviors, to test whether sex-typed behaviors are learned, and to reduce sex typing. The complete experimental design, it is maintained, allows investigators to focus on the consequences of sex typing rather…