Investigates strategies of 10-year-olds and 14-year-olds in tasks requiring prospective memory. Subjects were instructed to perform activities after waiting 30 minutes. As predicted, strategic time-monitoring occurred more frequently in the home than in the laboratory. Emphasizes the power of the laboratory as a contrasting context for…

Examined the effects of an audiovisual distractor on the visual attention paid to TV by preschool children characterized as distractible. The effectiveness of an audiovisual distractor eliciting a head turn from the TV was diminished when TV viewing had been maintained for at least 15 seconds. (PCB)

Western and Chinese children six years of age judged that an initially intense positive or negative emotional reaction would wane gradually over time. Children four years of age were less consistent, but, when steps were taken to insure their comprehension, they too judged that emotion wanes gradually over time. (Author/RH)

Measures the degree of interdependence in timing between infants' right and left arm movements and between movements of both arms and the onsets of stressed vowels in tape-recorded infant-appropriate speech. (HOD)

It was hypothesized that infants' examining behavior, in contrast to other activity, reflects focused attention and active intake of information. The first study with 7- and 12-month-olds supported the hypothesis. The second and third studies investigated the effects of age and familiarity on both latency to and duration of examining. (Author/RH)

Involving second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth graders and undergraduates, three experiments evaluated the prediction that representations of knowledge of the weeks and months of the year develop from a verbal-list stage to a stage at which image representations are present. Results are interpreted as supporting the two-stage model and appear…

Examines whether vocal exchanges between preverbal infants and their mothers show characteristics similar to those found to be typical of conversational exchanges between competent adult speakers. (HOD)

Tests two hypotheses concerning developmental change in the speed of cognitive processes: (1) age differences in processing time reflect changes that are specific to particular tasks, and (2) age differences in processing speed do not reflect task-specific change but are due instead to more general developmental change. (HOD)

Two experiments examined hyperactive children's tendency to underfocus their attention during learning. Taken together, the results of both experiments demonstrated the validity of the attentional diffusion hypothesis and indicate the need to assess the central processing demands associated with central and incidental learning in order to evaluate…

Contrasts a fixed-rate presentation list with one in which half the items in a single list were presented at a fast rate and half at a slow rate during paired associative learning with 24 children (aged 8 to 22 years) who were diagnosed with having an attention deficit disorder. (HOD)

Preschool, second-, and sixth-grade children performed developmentally gradated, easy and difficult visual discrimination tasks in a quiet room or with one of two levels of extraneous auditory stimulation. Subjects' errors, response latencies, and glances away from the task were recorded. (Author/RH)

Examines the implications of temporal separation for children's developmental differences in inferences drawn about an individual's characteristics after observing multiple instances of that individual's behavior. Also tests two competing hypotheses about how young children process information separated in time. (HOD)