Investigates the development of the appearance-reality distinction in 24 children of 5 years, 24 undergraduates, and 12 adults. Results suggest that there is a transitional period in the development of the distinction that begins around age 5 years. (RJC)

Critiques findings and interpretations of an investigation of the role of schooling and urbanization on the acquisition of conservation of physical quantities in Senegalese children. Concludes that the investigation showed a smaller impact of schooling, even in the rural milieu, than a previous study of Senegalese children. (RJC)

In Europe preschools are viewed as providers of both child care and early education. Preschool programs there are optional, universally available, and designed to further children's social and cognitive development. In the advanced industrialized world, only the U.S. and Great Britain are still debating differences between care and education.…

Examines the ability of 140 children of 3-5 years to use functional standards to judge size. The ability to use nonegocentric functional standards was present by age 3. However, 3-year-olds performed above chance only when their attention was directed to the relevant function. (RJC)

Reviewed are the causes of oxygenation deprivation during the birth process, effects on the brain, clinical manifestations, developmental consequences in terms of cognitive and motor deficits, and implications for educators. (JDD)

Outlines a theory of metaphor that posits varying levels of semantic processing and formalizes the levels in terms of kinds of semantic mapping operators. Predicted complexity of semantic mapping operators was tested using metaphor interpretations of 204 children aged 6-12 years and 24 adults. Processing score increased predictably with age. (SAK)

The study found that transfer of training by mentally handicapped adults receiving Feuerstein's Instrumental Enrichment program could not be demonstrated in clients' workshop or job placement (far transfer) settings. Transfer was demonstrated on specific tasks designed to measure cognitive abilities developed by the program (near transfer). (DB)

Extends parallel of cognitive and moral development to levels of spiritual development and denominational choice. Suggests with an awareness of the client's level of spiritual development, the therapist can be of greater assistance to clients asking for assistance in clarification of spiritual dilemmas. (Author/ABL)

Examined Piaget's claim that young children have difficulties constructing common multiples because of an inability to abstract the number of actions performed to obtain a number of objects. Subjects were two groups of preschool children in sharing tasks. Results showed improvement in performance based on certain conditions, but the significance…

This study observed naturalistic humor in six young children with autism and six matched children with Down's syndrome, as they interacted with their mothers. Autistic children produced and appreciated humor to a limited extent, but they produced less humor overall and less humor involving nonverbal incongruity compared to matched controls.…

Implicit understanding of false belief was investigated by monitoring where preschoolers looked in anticipation of a protagonist reappearing, when the protagonist mistakenly thinks that his desired object is in a different place from where it really is. Two-year olds erroneously looked at the object's real location whereas most older children…

Five experiments examined three-year olds' ability to complete a false belief task that was manipulated in terms of their grasp of the narrative base. Children who failed a traditional task succeeded if they narrated the book version back to the experimenter. The results suggest that the structure of three-year olds' event memories is central to…

Toddlers were asked to find a hidden toy based on one hidden in a scale model of the room, after varying periods of delay. Subjects experiencing a longer delay on the first trial performed more poorly than those experiencing the long delay later in the trials. Results indicate the difficulty for children of keeping a symbol-referent relation in…

Discusses several research efforts focusing on understanding students' attributes and validating instructional programs to improve mathematical learning and provides several instructional recommendations to assist teachers in enhancing mathematics learning for all students. (MKR)

Presents evidence that human infants possess a mechanism for determining and representing small numbers of entities and procedures for operating on these representations to extract numerical relationships between them. Presents a model for this mechanism and discusses its relation to later numerical knowledge. Contains 42 references. (MKR)