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…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

This study incorporated a correlational methodology into an experimental context to determine the functional components of rehearsal strategies in children's discrimination learning. The subjects for this study were 120 fifth- and sixth-grade children attending two elementary schools located in middle-class areas of Ogden, Utah. According to the…

A well established finding in the discrimination learning literature is that pictures are learned more rapidly than their associated verbal labels. It was hypothesized in this study that the usual superiority of pictures over words in a discrimination list containing same-instance repetitions would disappear in a discrimination list containing…

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)

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)

Comparison between relational concepts and word definitions coincided with lower levels of thinking, and abstract definitions with the highest level. (Author)

How strategies affect learning of categories that lack necessary and sufficient attributes is explored. The authors propose that strategy variations induced by instructions affect only the amount of information represented about attributes, not processes operating on representations. An experiment required subjects to classify schematic faces into…

The discrimination of minimally paired speech sounds by seven severely retarded children (mean age 3.2 years, and mean IQ 38.4) was compared with the discrimination performance of eight normally developing 7-month-old infants. (Author/PHR)