This study investigated how 4-month-old infants represent sequences: Do they track the statistical relations among specific sequence elements (e.g., AB, BC) or do they encode abstract ordinal positions (i.e., B is second)? Infants were habituated to sequences of 4 moving and sounding elements--3 of the elements varied in their ordinal position…

Argues that, although Piaget's seminal work on children's use of intention and consequence information to make moral evaluations has spawned a substantial amount of research, progress in this area has been hampered by serious conceptual and methodological problems. Offers some methodological guidelines for conducting research in this area.…

Verbal and behavioral measures of children's knowledge are frequently dissociated. These situations represent a largely untapped but important resource for furthering an understanding of human cognition. In this paper, verbal-behavioral dissociations in children are discussed and analyzed, drawing from a wide range of domains. The article explores…

Calls for a process-oriented approach to study of categorization in infancy. Maintains that further understanding of infant categorization and its changes with development requires a more direct assessment of infants' category formation. Argues that two research directions will enhance understanding of categorization: (1) contextual variations on…

Argues that the simplification strategy of research is useful for understanding the basic cognitive processes that are necessary for mature performance in conservation, transitivity, moral judgment, causal inference, and other Piagetian tasks. (JMB)

Suggests that, with the waning influence of Piaget and shortcomings of information-processing perspectives of cognitive growth, cognitive developmentalists lack a metatheory to guide their research. Posits developmental biology as metatheory for cognitive development. Introduces basic principles of evolutionary psychology, and examples of…

Despite the prevalence of bilingualism, language acquisition research has focused on monolingual infants. Monolinguals cannot learn minimally different words (e.g., "bih" and "dih") in a laboratory task until 17 months of age ( J. F. Werker, C. T. Fennell, K. M. Corcoran, & C. L. Stager, 2002). This study was extended to 14- to 20-month-old…

Examined the relation of language to thought in a cross-sectional study of 24 infants between 12 and 24 months of age. (Author/JMB)

Two experiments investigated the role of the sorting-presentation procedure in promoting organized recall in second grade children. (Author/JMB)

Describes two studies designed to determine how children in first through third grades become aware of their failure to comprehend instructions. Results suggested that children's initial insensitivity to their own comprehension failure is due to a relative lack of constructive processing. (JMB)

First and fifth graders' incidental free and cued recall were tested after an orienting task in which semantic and acoustic encoding were constrained for different words by requiring the children to answer questions about either the words' meanings or sounds. (Author/JMB)

First and fifth graders sorted cards into two piles based on the orientation of a T figure. Sorting took place in the presence of irrelevant information which did or did not contrast in line slope with the target, or in the absence of irrelevant information. (Author/JMB)

This study examined the general importance of similarity in children's causal reasoning and the relation between similarity and the other principles of causal inference. Participants were 16 boys and 16 girls at each of four grade levels: K, 2, 4, and 6. (Author/JMB)

Although dissociations in children's responses are sometimes about "getting it right" for an experimenter, they might also often reflect differences between conscious and subconscious processing that are not geared to correct performance. Research with adults also reveals many cases of dissociation, and adults can more easily be subjected to…