Habituation of looking time has become the standard method for studying cognitive processes in infancy. This method has a long history and derives from the study of memory and habituation itself. Often, however, it is not clear how researchers make decisions about how to implement habituation as a tool to study processes such as categorization,…

Infants were tested in three studies of the acquisition and long-term retention of category-specific information. Results document retention of category-specific information after intervals of two weeks. (PCB)

Infants exposed to a set of artificially-created face stimuli having distinct mean and modal prototypes showed a pattern of behavior predicted by category abstraction models. Infants appeared to abstract, at the time of learning, a feature-count summary of the category displayed. (Author/RH)

Assesses children's recall performance using three memory instructions: standard free recall, repetition, and categorical processing. Recall performance was about equal for standard versus repetition and superior when category processing is used, especially with highly representative items. Concludes that at both 7 years and 10 years the…

Examines memory for room-sized spatial arrangement in relation to spatial and classification operations. Sixty first-grade children were given two Piagetian spatial tasks and a two-dimensional point duplication problem. Results of multiple regression showed that Euclidean knowledge (measured by verticality) and age in months predicted memory for…

In a classification task, preschoolers matched a target stimulus with a conventional category, a visually similar item that cut across conventional categories, or an unrelated item. Items were presented in picture, verbal, and picture-verbal conditions. In all conditions, conventional classifications outnumbered visual ones, and this difference…

The role of variation as a determinant of infant categorical responding was investigated in three studies of infants 7 to 7 1/2 months of age. Sixty-three infants, divided into groups of 21 each, were habituated to color slide poses of either one, two, or six different adult female faces. Their responses to a novel pose of a familiar face and a…

Describes four experiments that examined the ability of second- and fifth-grade children and college adults to use "extra-list" cues to retrieve episodic information from memory. Shows that effective cue use varied with both the "match" of cue and event classification, and with the associative structure of permanent memory.…

This study investigated taxonomic clustering and use of frequency associations as features in the semantic memory of children (n=30 in grades two and six) with learning disabilities (LD). Results suggested that, when individual child-generated word lists (i.e., meaningful) are used, children with LD may not be impaired in their ability to utilize…

The way cognitive, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can aid in further understanding of memory span change in children is discussed. ERPs are time-dependent changes in electrical activity of the brain (as recorded by scalp electrodes) following the presentation of a physical stimulus through auditory, visual, or somatosensory modalities. The…

This paper reviews work on the representation of knowledge from within psychology and artificial intelligence. The work covers the nature of representation, the distinction between the represented world and the representing world, and significant issues concerned with propositional, analogical, and superpositional representations. Specific topics…

Although studies using recall tasks to measure memory typically report age-related declines in performance for older subjects, little is known about how these research results relate to performance in actual situations. A study was undertaken to determine whether years of experience in a domain of knowledge could compensate for age-related…

Examines development of event memory by determining how personally experienced events with two types of structure were reported by kindergartners and adults. Events in making and playing with clay were organized causally and temporally. Results show that adults and children used a goal-based hierarchical structure to remember events, although use…

Developmental changes leading to mature judgments of the relative effectiveness of verbal memory strategies were examined in 60 subjects (20 each from second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade classrooms). Subjects viewed videotapes of a female child who was given the task of remembering a set of categorizable pictures. Demonstrations of four memory…

Tested 32 4-year-olds and 32 6-year-olds for free and cued recall following either play-and-remember or sort-and-remember instructions and assessed them for their metamemory of the efficacy of conceptual and perceptual sorting strategies. Younger children recalled more items under sort-and-remember, whereas no recall differences were found for the…