Piaget's conceptualization of concrete and formal operations is presented. It is contended that Piaget has obfuscated logic, metaphysics and methodology. (MS)

Derives a theoretical statement about children's understanding of the mind from Wittgenstein's private-language argument that understanding the mind involves acquiring rules governing the use of linguistic expressions about the mind. Presents developmental evidence illustrating Wittgenstein's argument and its differences from the simulation and…

A study of 17 adults with mental ages between 2-4 years examined whether they could show accurate identity matching-to-sample when provided with minimal instructional programming. Eight participants showed highly accurate matching. Of the eight who failed and were available for further study, five ultimately demonstrated highly accurate matching.…

Describes psychological approaches to study of cognition and emotion, identifies issues that may provide direction to understanding the organization and integration of cognition and emotion in development. Maintains that an integrative model for the study of "cogmotion" is needed, suggesting that cogmotion research will contribute to the exchange…

Suggests some difficulties and challenges in understanding and teaching Piaget's new theory. Outlines some differences between Piaget's new and standard theories, such as the diminished status of the emergent skills that mark the onset of concrete operational thinking and the perception of achievements in concrete operations as empirical…

Five experiments investigated children's understanding that expectations based on prior experience may influence a person's interpretation of ambiguous visual information. Results suggest that understanding of interpretation begins at approximately six years of age. (HTH)

Three experiments using "backward reasoning" found that: age differences occurred in predicting surprise relative to false belief; by age five or six, children claim that surprise occurs when gaining knowledge where one was previously ignorant or held a false belief; by age seven to nine, they understand that surprise will more likely…

Two experiments examined theory of mind in middle childhood by examining changes in the organization of mental verbs of knowing. Found that older children and comprehension monitors placed greater emphasis on the certainty aspects of mental activity than did younger children and comprehension nonmonitors, suggesting that important aspects of a…

Three experiments investigated 14-month olds' capacity for superordinate-level inductions, using animal and vehicle domains. Found that infants did generalize properties in these domains, and that their inductions were more influenced by conceptual category than by perceptual similarity. (HTH)

Argues that causal understanding is a developmental primitive: children develop core concepts of causality at a very early age, causality plays a necessary role in subsequent development across many domains, and basic causal processes can be activated automatically or implicitly. (HTH)

The language of thinking embraces the many ways we describe human mental states and processes. The vocabulary of thinking can be roughly divided into terms marking an epistemic stance, terms describing an intellectual process, and terms describing an intellectual product. Reasoning is not the only important cognitive process. Thinking-rich…

Four- to 11-year-olds made duration, distance, and speed judgments on Piagetian tasks where cars ran on parallel tracks. Among younger children, duration and distance judgments had approximately the same difficulty. Among older children, distance judgments were easier than duration judgments, and symmetry of effects of temporal and spatial…

Four observations of 16 agricultural science faculty at work showed that classroom discourse was predominantly at lower cognitive levels. Classes of 51 or more had the fewest higher-level thinking opportunities and 400-level courses had the greatest. The factor having the greatest effect on thinking opportunities was the instructor. (SK)

Two intact chemistry classes participated in a study and the same teacher taught both a line graphing unit with computer-supported activities and one without. Results indicate that there were no statistically significant interaction effects among treatments and scientific reasoning levels. (Contains 40 references.) (Author/NB)