Investigates the ability of adults and children to understand aspects of semantic ambiguity. (DD)

The report by A. Stephens and J. McLaughlin (1974) on retarded-nonretarded group differences in performance on Piagetian reasoning tasks was critically examined. (Author)

The present study was designed to explore what subjects can and will do spontaneously in memory retrieval situations. Subjects were kindergarten, third grade and college students. (SB)

The role of cognitive development in the formation of social judgments was investigated in 2 experiments examining children's use of task outcome information in attributional judgments of ability and task difficulty. (SB)

A conceptualization of intentional behavior is presented stressing the problem of diagnosis. Methodological requirements for the study of intentional memory development are used in a selective review of the literature. (MS)

Twenty first and 20 fourth grade children were tested on perceptual tasks involving moving stimuli that did not touch. In these tables, one stimulus appeared, among adults, to cause the other to move. (MS)

Interviews with 4- to 8-year olds indicated that children's understanding of how it is that they can see object develops gradually. This article presents a map of this development in terms of two distinct modes of cognitive functioning, the ikonic mode and concrete symbolic mode, drawn from the interviews and the SOLO (Structure of Learning…

Contains the following commentaries: "Further Distinctions between Magic, Reality, Religion, and Fiction"; "The Role of Creative Control and Culture in Children's Fantasy/Reality Judgments"; "The Last of the Magicians? Children, Scientists, and the Invocation of Hidden Causal Powers"; "Rescuing Magical Thinking…

Examined 3- to 5-year-olds' attributions of the mental states of television characters depicting make-believe or realistic actions. Found that children who identified when television characters were engaging in pretend play did not necessarily infer the pretenders' thoughts and beliefs. Inferring pretenders' thoughts was related to performance on…

Three studies investigated the analogical reasoning of 127 children in a physics task using an analogy generated by the children. Found that 9- to 10-year olds showed spontaneous transfer in both negative and positive analogy training conditions, while 7-year olds showed no transfer in the positive analogy condition but transferred only selected…

Examined 80 children in second and fourth grades on melodic and rhythmic discrimination and classification tasks. Found evidence to support the existence of internal representations of tonality and meter in both groups, as well as evidence of a developmental effect for the classification task. (EAJ)

Three experiments examined the early development of three- to five-year-old children's analysis of spatial patterns. Found that the youngest children segmented out simple, well-formed, spatially independent parts and used simple relational structures to bind these parts together, whereas older children constructed forms that included increasingly…

Examined children's understanding of false belief, representational change, and appearance-reality distinction. Subjects were 34 Junin Quechuan children, 4 to 8 years old. Findings indicated an understanding of the appearance-reality distinction and suggested an improvement with age. Children demonstrated poor understanding of representational…

Two studies examined how task content that activates predator-avoidance affects preschool children's performance on a false-belief task. Findings indicated that the proportion of correct answers on the playmate-avoidance task was greater than that for the predator-avoidance task, suggesting that activation of the predator-avoidance system…