The use of a verbal rehearsal strategy (repeating the items to be remembered to oneself in serial order) has been identified as a key factor in explaining working memory (WM) development. However, the debate remains open with regard to the age at which children are able to use it, and the actual benefits of using such a strategy. Numerous…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Children's imitation of adults plays a prominent role in human cognitive development. However, few studies have investigated how children represent the complex structure of observed actions which underlies their imitation. We integrate theories of action segmentation, memory, and imitation to investigate whether children's event representation is…

When placing numbers along a number line with endpoints 0 and 1000, children generally space numbers logarithmically until around the age of 7, when they shift to a predominantly linear pattern of responding. This developmental shift of responding on the number placement task has been argued to be indicative of a shift in the format of the…

This study focused on the developmental ability of 5, 7, ll, and 19 year olds to use a cognitive strategy to recall a series of eight movements under conditions of randomness, order, or randomness with training to organize. Results are discussed. (Author/MT)

Strategies young children used to correct errors in nesting seriated cups changed substantially with age, becoming increasingly more flexible and involving more extensive restructuring of the relationships among the cups. The same trend toward increasing flexibility of thought and action also appeared in procedures children used to combine the…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

Examines the issue of object sorting in early infancy. Forty-eight infants at 6, 9, and 12 months were presented with eight sets of small, manipulable objects. At six months, selective manipulation was absent; at nine months, 94 percent of the infants sequentially touched similar objects and at 12 months 100 percent did so. (Author/DB)

Investigates the influence of logical skills (inclusion and seriation) on the degree and kind of semantic integration performed on remembered material among 47 third- and fourth-grade boys and girls and college students. (JMB)

Examined developmental changes in the use of distance-based and calendar-based approaches to estimate the recency of two events. Found that children's ability to discriminate temporal relationships between two events appears by four to five years of age. In contrast, use of calendar information and cognizance of annual patterns was found only in…

Three experiments are reported which utilized a five-term transitive inference task to investigate the development of preschool childrens', elementary school students', and college students' ability to solve transitive inferences on length relations. A developmental model specifying changes at two stages of constructing an internal linear order is…

Investigates the role of operative schemes in explaining older children's superior memory on past Piagetian memory tasks. Contrasts were made between the performance of normal v learning disabled grade school children, and between preschool children who either possessed or lacked seriation schemes. (Author/SS)

To investigate reasoning capacities involved in learning to read, a Test of Multiple Seriation (from Piaget) was developed. Problems of a test used by Lunzer and Dolan are discussed. Results showed that word recognition and reading comprehension at age nine correlate significantly with multiple seriation, independent of IQ. (Editor/SJL)

Studied effectiveness of instruction in seriation and classification for kindergartners cognitively lagging behind their peers. Found that extensive classification and seriation instruction in a variety of formats was particularly helpful in facilitating cognitive gains for struggling kindergartners. Individualized instruction provided children…

Six mildly and moderately retarded children (ages 6-8) were instructed in the Piagetian constructs of unidimensional classification and/or seriation using the "Piacelleration" learning set technique. After one semester, subjects made significant gains on: classification and seriation tasks, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and the…