Investigates effects of perceptual salience and specific orientation values on 16 kindergarten and fourth-grade children executing a speeded sorting task. Kindergarten results supported the cognitive processing prediction that orientation sorting times would vary as a function of condition, but no differences were obtained for the fourth-grade…

Examines how children's responses to questions about object terms varied across objects and the degree to which children specified common and conventional values for different object dimensions. (HOD)

Examines, in three experiments, infant sensitivity at 20, 30, and 36 weeks of age to 3-dimensional structure of a human form specified through biomechanical motions. Findings are interpreted as suggesting that infants, by 36 weeks of age, are extracting fundamental properties necessary for interpreting a point-light display as a person. (Author/BE)

Ratings over five repeated measures and a two week follow-up indicated that color preferences shifted markedly, yielding the expected interaction. The racial implications of these findings are discussed. (Authors)

This investigation also studied the relationship between gestational age and preferences for contour. (CB)

The most significant finding is that classification according to complete similarity not only occurs much earlier than reported by Inhelder and Piaget, but also does not follow the developmental course reported by Inhelder and Piaget. (Author)

Results are consistent with the assumption that subjects do not change functional stimuli because of the negative transfer produced by learning different responses to the same nominal stimuli. (Authors/CB)

In the course of two experiments, groups of kindergarten, second, fourth, sixth grade and college students received several discrimination problems to investigate hypothesis testing behavior. (Authors/MB)

The hypothesis that overall-similarity relations structure both adults' and children's classifications of heterogeneous objects (objects that differ in a variety of ways) was supported in two experiments. When objects varied simultaneously on many dimensions, adults and children constructed classifications that maximized within-category similarity…

Adult humans searched for a hidden goal in images depicting 3-dimensional rooms. Images contained either featural cues, geometric cues, or both, which could be used to determine the correct location of the goal. In Experiment 1, participants learned to use featural and geometric information equally well. However, men and women showed significant…

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether…

The significance of spatial factors on an initial segmentation and an active attentional phase was demonstrated by briefly exposing spatial configurations of elements, and then asking the subjects to reproduce the patterns or to search them for a target letter. The stimulus displays consisted of small o's forming different spatial configurations,…

A doll choice task was administered to white and black nursery and kindergarten children by same and other race examiners. Male and female dolls were presented which differed only in skin color. Strong preference for white dolls found by previous studies was not obtained. (Author/BJG)

A total of 128 first- and second-graders participated in two sets of shift problems: (1) four extra-dimensional shifts; and (2) shift problems with two types of cue-reinforcement conditions (same and reversal). (ED)

This theoretical paper is concerned with the evaluation and preference responses of preschool children to light- and dark-skinned human figures. The paper examines the hypothesis that in children the frequently observed bias favoring light-skinned persons over dark-skinned persons is not a racial bias but is related to early learning experiences…