In three experiments, nine-month-old infants were trained to fixate on a particular feature in a pair of stimuli that varied along three dimensions. In a fourth experiment, infants were trained to fixate on a stimulus compound until reaching a learning criterion. Infants' discrimination learning under these conditions implied an ability to attend…

Considers the debate about learning as based on conditioning or cognitive processes. Explores historical episodes in this debate in which issues were resolved first in favor of conditioning theory and then increasingly in favor of cognitive processes. Interprets the study by Coldren and Colombo reported in this monograph (PS 522 654) as a…

Tested infants' remembrance of the orientations and angular relations of line segments. In one experiment, infants "dishabituated" to a change in orientation but not a change in angle. In two further experiments, infants familiar with either an acute or obtuse angle gave strong novelty preferences to a different angle. (BC)

Compared food texture preferences during infancy and toddlerhood. Found that infants displayed more negative expressions and head and body movements in response to complex textures than to simple textures. Toddlers displayed more positive head and body movements and more eagerness in response to complex than to simple textures. Experience with…

In 3 experiments, the authors manipulated response instructions for 2 concurrently performed tasks. Specifically, the authors' instructions described left and right keypresses on a manual task either as left versus right or as blue versus green keypresses and required either "left" versus "right" or "blue" versus "green" concurrent verbalizations.…

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal…

The authors conducted 3 experiments to explore the roles of curvature, density, and relative proximity in the perceptual organization of ambiguous dot patterns. To this end, they developed a new family of regular dot patterns that tend to be perceptually grouped into parallel contours, dot-sampled structured grids (DSGs). DSGs are similar to the…

Presents an investigation of the hypothesis that an increase in the salience of the total class dimension should improve class-inclusion performance. Subjects were 220 children in kindergarten through third grades. (SDH)

A look at the two dimensions of the structure of content for instructional purposes: 1) psychological; and, 2) logical. (HB)

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)

Creative drawings of three preschool girls were modified using reinforcement procedures. Adult judges gave higher ratings of creativity for drawings with increased form diversity but not for those with increased color diversity. The role of social validation in defining and encouraging creativity is discussed. (Author/BH)

This study compared the use of discrete and relational aspects of visual configurations in making similarity judgments. Subjects were 3-, 4-, 5-, and 8-year-old children and adults. (BD)

Analysis of 40 first-grade children's performance on two discrimination learning problems revealed that children do transfer dimensional information between the visual and tactual modalities. (Author/JMB)

The effects of stimulus dimension and mode of exploration on preschool children's responses to pattern meanings and unusual uses tasks of original thinking were studied. The 3D tasks generated more responses overall. Visual and haptic exploration combined with 3D was the only condition studied to meet all criteria for construct validity.…