A total of 12 three, four, five, seven, and nine year olds and 12 adult control subjects were asked 20 questions about two exemplars of each of 16 categories of animate beings and inanimate objects. Children's responses indicated that animism is not a pervasive phenomenon and does not appear to be the most primitive mode of conceptualization.…

The normative rule began to predominate at age 10 and was the only rule employed by 13-year-olds. In contrast, almost all 7-year-olds simplified the equalization task to an ordinal level. Four different nonalgebraic rules were identified. Neither young children's tendency to simplify nor older children's capacity to quantify could be detected in…

A total of 50 children between 6 and 13 years of age were tested for a predicted, eight-step sequence of family role concepts. Dolls representing typical roles were used as props, and each child was asked questions concerning role explanations and increasingly abstract family definitions. The sequence was found to be scalable and age-related.…

Discusses five- and six-year-old children's conceptions of life and death. Children were questioned about animals, plants, and inanimate objects. The most errors occurred when children judged inanimate objects; the fewest when they judged animals. The order of questions about either life or death significantly influenced children's responses. (NH)

Four experiments investigated three- and four-year-old children's knowledge of projective size-distance and projective shape-orientation relationships. Results indicated that preschool children's understanding of these relationships seems at least partly cognitive rather than wholly perceptive, providing further evidence for the acquisition of…

The purpose of present experiments with subjects approximately three, five, and seven years of age was to provide additional evidence for the obviousness of the generative transmission principle and to provide initial evidence for the secondary principles of absence and facility. Empirical support was found for each of these selection principles,…

Young children and adolescents regarded the crossing of stereotyped gender boundaries as more wrong and expressed a greater personal commitment to sex-role regularity than did children in middle childhood. Although young children and adolescents viewed gender differentiations as an aspect of psychological-personal identity, their conceptions of…

By varying task requirements within a common procedural framework, four experiments established conditions under which children exhibit different understandings of life. Overall, results suggested that even four- and five-year-olds know that people and other animals are alive and that almost all "inanimate objects" are not. (Author/RH)

Examines kindergartners' and second graders' knowledge of concept attribute importance and the children's use of this knowledge to categorize. (HOD)

Research has not clearly determined whether memory development in childhood and adulthood can be accounted for by the age variation of cognitive processes other than memory. To examine this issue, a study was conducted based on a model of structures and processes in complex information processing. Subjects (N=162) were presented with two lists of…

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…

Describes three experiments that examined how children (4- to 11-year-olds) use their knowledge of the attributes of living things to infer whether particular objects are alive. (HOD)

Addresses limitations of previous research by testing second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade children on three measures: an open-ended interview, a story-recognition task, and a questionnaire about the importance of different characteristics to friendships and acquaintanceships. Friendship expectations based on dispositional characteristics increased…

Examines a general developmental hypothesis concerned with children's understanding of perceptual experience, memory, intentions, and emotions. It is hypothesized that young children view the mind as passive in relation to the external world and regard external events as determining subjective experience, whereas older children know many ways that…

Examines elementary school children's concept of authority with regard to the age and social position of command-giver and the type of command given. Shows that children's evaluation of adult and peer authority were based on a combination of age and position in the social context. (HOD)