Experiment 1 examined the relationship between dimensional preference and proportion of optional reversal shifts among adults. Experiment 2 examined dimensional preference and shift behaviors using an intradimensional-extradimensional shift paradigm. The results indicate that adults show the same type of behavior previously throught to…

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…

Two experiments investigated whether 5-month olds would look longer at rotating "drawbridge" appearing to violate physical laws because they knew it was causally impossible. Findings indicated that infants' longer gaze at 180-degree rotations was due to simple perceptual preference for more motion, challenging Baillargeon's (1987) claim…

A total of 174 first, second, and third graders were tested to examine the relation between perceptual salience and cognitive style. The results indicated that implusives made more errors than reflectives only on trials requiring the use of the least salient dimension and that these performance differences decreased with age. (JMB)

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

This research tested the hypothesis that young children's bias to generalize names for solid objects by shape is the product of statistical regularities among nouns in the early productive vocabulary. Fifteen- to 20-month-olds given intensive naming experiences with typical noun categories developed a precocious shape bias and showed accelerated…

This study examined 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to spontaneously use the relative duration and frequency of another's object-directed gaze for inferring that person's preference. In Experiment 1, analysis revealed a strong age effect for judgment accuracy, which could not be accounted for by cue-monitoring proficiency. Reducing the saliency of the…

The development of two structural principles, hierarchical complexity and interruption, was examined in a new domain: two-dimensional pictures. Subjects were 60 4-to 5 1/2-year-old children. (Author/MP)

A matching task was presented to 120 subjects from 6 to 20 years of age to investigate the relative influence of dimensional salience and salience of variability on problem solving. The task included four dimensions: form, color, number, and position. (LLK)

The specific hypothesis tested by this research is that children are able to attend to multiple cues simultaneously and are able to use the information contained in these cues. (Author)

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)

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)

Results showed that reversal shift was easier than extradimensional shift and that relative shift difficulty was unaffected by instructions, in contrast to findings with college-age subjects. (Authors)

Studied feeding-related arousal effects on a visual recognition paired-comparison task at newborn, 1, and 4 months of age. Found that newborns and 1-month olds shifted from a familiarity preference before feeding to a novelty preference after feeding. Control-group testing confirmed that shift was not due to increased stimulus exposure. By 4…

Young infants have repeatedly been shown to be slower than older infants to shift fixation from a midline stimulus to a peripheral stimulus. This is generally thought to reflect maturation of the neural substrates that mediate the disengagement of attention, but this developmental difference may also be attributable to young infants' slower…