Investigated the proposition that two distinct factors involved in life span cognitive development are mental speed and coordination efficiency. Results show dissociable speed of processing and working memory functioning over the life span and age-related differential effects of coordinative demands. (ET)

Discusses creativity, play, and nonconformity in children, including the illusion of thought disorder or abnormality, and aspects of everyday creativity, health, and survival. Describes creative divergence, chaotic amplification, the evolution of information, and primitive cognitive processes. Concludes with a discussion of cognitive styles,…

Examined whether young children can identify breaches of a permission rule and their sensitivity to the implications of such rules. Found that preschool children show considerable facility in reasoning about permission rules and can justify their choices. Results suggest that, when children violate a permission rule, they do so knowingly. (MOK)

Asserts the rationale for personal development work in counselor training stems directly from Rogers' claim of a selective constructive tendency. The basis for this belief and its implementation in experiential learning shows a number of paradoxes, however. As a result, this article states the Rogerian rationale for personal development work is…

Cognitive and family data on 82 children with developmental delays were collected in an eight-year longitudinal study. Examination of change scores (at ages 3, 6, and 11) identified increasing, stable, and decreasing patterns of change. There were significant correlations between change in intelligence quotient, entering developmental quotient,…

Archaeology and cultural anthropology show that humans developed many discrete skills (social, technological, natural history, and language intelligence) over the past million years, but only recently have combined these into "broad" intelligence. Understanding learning is a key issue. Metacognition, the ability to consider one's…

Results of 3 sentence-interpretation experiments involving 180 preschoolers suggest that very little explicit syntactic knowledge is needed to give children some structural clues to verb meaning. Sentence structure appears to have a meaning of its own that can be applied by analogy to the child's conceptual representation. (SLD)

Explores developing a concept image of functions. Includes assessment items, describes students' responses to these items, and interprets those responses. (KHR)

Links between theory of mind and episodic memory involving autonoetic consciousness were investigated in Japanese 4- to 6-year-olds. After age was controlled for, most theory of mind abilities showed no interrelations. Own and others' belief understandings on deceptive appearance tasks were solely related to source memory. Results suggest that…

Argues that effective moral education must address roadblocks in moral thinking, not merely urging moral development forward. Examines Lawrence Kohlberg's moral stages as immoral judgement marked by bias and manipulation. Views the Defining Issues Test (DIT) as a useful glimpse into the nefarious, focused on ideological content and commitment.…

Two studies examined whether preschoolers use whole-part juxtaposition to accurately interpret novel part terms. Results confirmed that children do use juxtaposition to guide learning of novel part terms and that such use was not due to memory effects nor to recognition of the grammatical frame accompanying juxtaposition. Children readily used…

This study examined whether 4- to 8-year-olds considered knowledge prerequisites for pretending and drawing. Children were asked if an artist (actor) who did not know what something was, yet whose drawing (behavior) resembled it, was actually drawing it (pretending to be it). Children performed similarly on pretending and drawing questions.…

Examines the cognitive supports that underlie achievement in science using a cultural historical framework and the activity setting (AS) construct with five features: personnel, motivation, scripts, task demands, and beliefs. Reports four emergent phenomena--science activities, the building of learning, meaning in lessons, and the conflict over…

Two experiments examined six-month-olds' ability to form an abstract containment category. Results indicated that, after habituation to object pairs in a containment relation, infants looked reliably longer at an example of an unfamiliar versus familiar containment relation, indicating that they could form a categorical representation of…

Examines the perceptual cues used by three- and four-month-old infants to categorically distinguish perceptually similar animal species. Indicates that cues form the facial and head region provide the critical source of information that allows young infants to categorically differentiate cats and dogs and presumably a number of other animal…