Whereas traditional theories of gender development have focused on individualistic paths, recent analyses have argued for a more social categorical approach to children's understanding of gender. Using a modeling paradigm based on K. Bussey and A. Bandura (1984), 3 experiments (N = 62, N = 32, and N = 64) examined preschoolers' (M age = 52.9…

Infants exposed to a set of artificially-created face stimuli having distinct mean and modal prototypes showed a pattern of behavior predicted by category abstraction models. Infants appeared to abstract, at the time of learning, a feature-count summary of the category displayed. (Author/RH)

Children who had received training in sorting pictures of men and women, and in sorting occupations according to rules that countered gender stereotypes, exhibited a more egalitarian response in subsequent measures of gender stereotyping and showed superior memory for counterstereotypic information in stories than did other children. (BC)

This study assessed the predictive utility of a classification-based model versus a representational memory-based model to account for the effects of verbal training on the acquired equivalence and distinctiveness paradigms. (Author/JMB)

The use of category organization in free recall was studied in elementary school students. Trained subjects showed higher recall. Several indices of organization were compared and evaluated. (ST)

Two tasks were used to evaluate the relationship between concept usage and the organization of knowledge in semantic memory for 7-, 11-, 15-, and 18-year-old subjects. (JMB)

The ability to perform induction appears early; however, underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Some argue that early induction is category based, whereas others suggest that early induction is similarity based. Category- and similarity-based induction should result in different memory traces and thus in different memory accuracy. Performing…

Assesses the effectiveness of different child-generated classification schemes on preschool children's memory performance. Children who organized pictures according to taxonomic categories (e.g., animals, vehicles) demonstrated significantly greater recall than children classified as nontaxonomic. (Author/MP)

Infants were tested in three studies of the acquisition and long-term retention of category-specific information. Results document retention of category-specific information after intervals of two weeks. (PCB)

Describes the slot-filler model of taxonomic knowledge development in which preschoolers derive "slot-filler" categories from event schemas. Maintains that the model has received considerable support across methodologies, ages, and sociocultural contexts. Argues that Krackow and Gordon's theorizing and methods could not lead to reliable,…

Asked children and adults to recall events from "Sesame Street." Found that subjects' memory was influenced by causal factors (number of causal relations to other events, place in the story's causal chain) and this influence increased with age; children recalled actions, whereas adults recalled protagonists' goals; and children's recall…

An investigation of the category-recall relationship using first, third, and fifth graders as subjects. Recall was found to be a function of the number of categories in the sort, and there were no differences in recall among the three retrieval conditions. (Author/SDH)

Results indicates that awareness of the facilitative effect of categorization on recall increases with age, particularly during the early grade-school years. (Author)

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)

Results as a whole did not support the hypothesis that poor readers show deficits in selective attention relative to age-matched normal readers. (RH)