With the rise of wearable technologies, mobile devices and artificial intelligence comes a growing pressure to understand downstream effects of cognitive offloading on children's future thinking and behavior. Here, we explored whether compelling children to use an indiscriminate cognitive offloading strategy affects their subsequent strategy…

This study purports to bridge the gap in research directed at people with Low Functioning Autism (LFA) by exploring if sensory discrimination ability can be used to assess cognitive functioning in children with LFA. The study was done in two phases: (i) a pilot phase (with 4 male participants; mean age = 3 years 6.5 months)--which tried to…

Stimulus over-selectivity is a phenomenon often displayed by individuals with many forms of developmental and intellectual disabilities, and also by individuals lacking such disabilities who are under cognitive strain. It occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment controls behavior. Adult participants were trained and…

This study investigates the ability of 6-month-old infants to attend to the continuous properties of a set of discrete entities. Infants were habituated to dot arrays that were constant in cumulative surface area yet varied in number for small (less than 4) or large (greater than 3) sets. Results revealed that infants detected a 4-fold (but not…

The ability of preverbal infants to form and use ill-defined categories, to respond differentially to contrasting categories, and to use specific dimensions in learning these categories is examined in 20 infants 10 months of age. Results show that infants are not only capable of learning two ill-defined categories, but that they can do so with…

This study attempts to assess differences in the three aspects of cognitive complexity--differentiation, discrimination, and integration--as functions of information about and interest in the relevant domain. The two groups of subjects consisted of 20 members of a local sports car club and an equal number from a local garden club. Each group had…

Strategies of kindergarten children in discrimination learning were studied in a factorial design with temporal placements of two introtact probes and two types of pretraining. Results support the expectation that the posttrial probe would improve the short-term efficiency of children in both pretraining conditions. (Author/MP)

Newborns were habituated to white squares of varying size and luminance and retested with colored squares for recovery of habituation. Newborns could discriminate yellow-green from white in large squares, but not in small squares. They could not discriminate blue, blue-green, or purple from white. Results suggest newborns have little…

Three studies were conducted to investigate reasons for the difficulties that children under 5 years of age experience with class inclusion tasks. The studies tested the claim that such tasks have a structural complexity that is beyond the children's processing ability. In experiment 1, class inclusion tasks were compared with other classification…

Research supported in part by OEO Headstart Subcontract No. 1410 with Michigan State University Headstart Evaluation and Research Center.

A strategy for teaching multiple discriminations was used to teach six severely delayed students to name the numbers on the face of a clock, the eight most popular colors, and letters of the alphabet. (Author)

Two experiments examined the determinants of children's belief or disbelief of statements made to them by other children. In both, the personal characteristics of the child transmitting the message were varied against message type and age of child receiving the message; transmitter characteristics were relative age and social dominance. (RH)

Experiment designed to collect further data related to the type of solution applied to the learning of a multiple-problem (ten) oddity discrimination. (Author)