The preference for color or form as bases for similarity judgments among preschoolers (ages 2-5) and its relationship to the differentiation of form and color concepts as indexed by discrimination, identification, and labeling were investigated. (SB)

Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a…

This experiment was designed to test whether paired objects described as interacting through movement are more memorable to young children than the same objects described as alike in structure or color. Drawings of eight familiar objects were presented in unfamiliar combinations to forty-five 4-year-old subjects. Objects were described as…

Study explores the preschool child's ability to operate on a cognitive level by testing his capacity to compare a concrete stimulus with some abstract concept. (Author/CB)

Four-year-old boys and girls initially named and matched by form more often than by color. Also, agreements involving form names and matches occurred more often than agreements involving color names and matches. (Authors)

Two experiments investigated why perceptual pretraining facilitates children's performance on concept problems involving a nonpreferred relevant dimension and preferred irrelevant dimensions. (JMB)

Object substitution masking (OSM) is said to occur when a perceptual object is hypothesized that is mismatched by subsequent sensory evidence, leading to a new hypothesized object being substituted for the first. For example, when a brief target is accompanied by a longer lasting display of nonoverlapping mask elements, reporting of target…

Experiment examined the generality of dimensional and cue-location biases in inference and role of directness of information. (Author)

This study had two major purposes: to examine the effects of dimensional salience upon the learning of conjunction and disjunction rules, and to investigate an alternative to the prevailing cognitive-change accounts of developmental differences in multidimensional problem solving. The relative salience of each of four stimulus dimensions (form,…

Examines how children's responses to questions about object terms varied across objects and the degree to which children specified common and conventional values for different object dimensions. (HOD)

In three studies, we investigated to what extent a geometrical representation in a psychological space succeeds in predicting typicality in animal, natural food and artifact concepts and whether contrast categories contribute to the prediction. In Study 1, we compared the predictive value of a family resemblance-based prototype model with a…

Uses the transposition paradigm to compare the influence of the adjectives "same" and "different" on the test choice of 5- and 9-year-old children. (Author/SDH)

The influence of the ability to conserve length in the development of a size concept was investigated in males and females aged 4 years through 9 years. (GO)