Explaining inconsistency may serve as an important mechanism for driving the process of causal learning. But how might this process generate amended beliefs? One way that explaining inconsistency may promote discovery is by guiding exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior. In order to investigate this, a study with young children ranging in age…

The interaction between age and conceptual tempo was a consistently significant finding. (Author)

Results clearly demonstrated the existence of perceptual sets in children under 4 years. The interpretation of findings suggests a process whereby the present method was successful in creating the mediating conditions necessary for a perceptual set. (Authors)

Intellectual realism was investigated by using as a model a cup with the defining feature (the handle) not visible, and a nondefining feature (a painted flower) visible. (Authors/MB)

Preschool, first-grade, and fifth-grade children served as Ss in 2 experiments designed to test the developmental hypothesis that memorizing and perceiving are functionally undifferentiated for the young child, with deliberate memorization only gradually emerging as a separate and distinctive form of cognitive encounter with external data.…

In the fifth and sixth years of life, the ability of girls to identify primary colors by name is greater than that of boys. Children in the sixth year who attend school outperform those who have not been to school, and girls of this age who have not been to school name colors as well as boys who attend school. (Authors)

Groups trained to compare the whole and subset improved in cue identification from negative instances; performance in the stimulus exposure group declined. (Authors)

Results appear to indicate that the belief systems of the young child about the attributes of a stimulus person can be altered extensively by introducing characteristics completely unrelated to these attributes into the semantic representation of that person. (Authors)

An experiment was conducted comparing the effectiveness for producing response inhibition of high- and low-intensity physical punishment and elaborated verbal punishment when punishment was delivered either early or late in a response sequence. (Author)

Comparison between relational concepts and word definitions coincided with lower levels of thinking, and abstract definitions with the highest level. (Author)

Relevance of cognitive and developmental variables to observational learning and imitation is also discussed. (Authors/MB)

Analyses revealed consistent support for the hypothesis that number conservation is developmentally prior to liquid quantity conservation. (Authors)

The data indicated that disadvantaged children required more time to process visual information than did middle-class children, but the processing speed for the 2 groups tended to become more similar as grade level was increased. (Author)