Four-year olds, 6-year olds, and adults were given a computer-game mental rotation task, but with no instructions on mental rotation or other mental activity. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year olds were comparable to adults in spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year olds who referred to…

Used short narratives to study false memory in 6-, 8-, and 11-year olds and adults. The persistence effect and false-memory creation effect were greatest for statements that would be regarded as factually incorrect reports of events in sworn testimony; like suggestive questioning, interviews that involve nonsuggestive recognition questions may…

Investigates the ways in which young adults make judgments about two contrasting kinds of rights: moral worthiness (the aretaic) and moral obligation (the deontic), reflecting on how thinking in these areas may be coordinated with responsibility judgments and behavior. Discusses what might be gained if the aretaic domain were taken into account in…

Analyzes the practices of two skilled and experienced middle level teachers with regard to research-based criteria for cognitive scaffolding in support of inquiry-oriented teaching. Research questions include: (1) what do skilled, experienced teachers do when scaffolding inquiry-oriented instruction; and (2) in what ways do they align with…

Two studies examined age differences in conditional reasoning. Results indicated that 8-year-olds performed better when antecedents were weakly associated with consequents than on strongly associated antecedent/consequents, with no difference among 11-year-olds. Eight-year-olds did better on ad hoc premises than on causal premises, with no…

Examined influence of object labels and shape similarity on 16- to 21-month-olds' inferences. Found that infants generalized non-obvious property of unlabeled objects to test objects with highly similar shapes. For objects labeled with novel nouns, infants relied on shape similarity and shared labels to generalize properties. For objects labeled…

Two experiments tested a model of young children's induction that specified contributions of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to children's induction. Results support model predictions and point to a developmental shift, from treating linguistic labels as an attribute contributing to similarity to treating them as markers of a common…

Two experiments examined children's semantic representations and semantic naming errors. Results suggested that functional and physical properties are core aspects of object representations in the semantic lexicon and that the degree of semantic knowledge makes words more or less vulnerable to retrieval failure. Discussion focuses on the dynamic…

Discusses ways to improve the understanding of problems involving combination and complementation. Analyzes three children's initial mental representations, procedures, and reflections when presented with four different situations. Concludes with the impacts of the logico-mathematical relation of inclusion in these processes. Contains 31…

Three experiments tested 21- and 27-month olds' ability to construct a path to a mentally re-presented goal. After seeing the goal-state configuration of problems, both age groups evinced planning. Demonstration of initial solution step was less effective than goal-state exposure. Even with specification of a greater proportion of the goal path,…

Four experiments examined the perceptual features used by 4.5- to 11.5-month olds to individuate objects involved in occlusion events. Results indicated that 4.5-month olds used shape and size features to individuate objects in occlusion events. By 7.5 months, infants used pattern, and by 11.5 months, they used color to reason about object…

Investigated developmental change in duration of auditory sensory memory for tonal frequency by measuring mismatch negativity, an electrophysiological component of the auditory event-related potential that is relatively insensitive to attention and does not require a behavioral response. Findings among children and adults suggest that there are…

Investigated kindergartners' unary and binary understanding of additive commutativity using performance on tasks involving change-add-to and part-part-whole word problems, respectively. Found that data were inconsistent with models put forth by Baroody and Gannon and by Resnick and suggest three alternate theoretical explanations. Success on tasks…

Offers suggestions for future investigations of theory-of-mind development. Maintains that there needs to be: (1) greater focus on the development of understanding of desire and intention; (2) research on the role of language in theory-of-mind development integrating representational-development and social-interaction views; and (3) investigation…

Maintains that the results of Wellman, Cross, and Watson's meta-analysis on the false belief task are perfectly compatible with "early competence" accounts that posit a specific, innate, and possibly modular basis for theory of mind. Asserts that Wellman and colleagues' arguments against such views stem from mistaken assumptions…