Given the legacy of John Bowlby, Attachment theory has often portrayed separation from a caregiver as likely to provoke protest, despair, and ultimately detachment in infants and young children. Indeed, the emotional challenge of separation is built into a key measurement tool of Attachment theory, the Strange Situation. However, James Robertson,…

Recent studies in neuroimagery and cognitive psychology support the view of sensory-motor based knowledge: when processing an object concept, neural systems would re-enact previous experiences with this object. In this experiment, a conceptual switching cost paradigm derived from Pecher, Zeelenberg, and Barsalou (2003, 2004) was used to…

The development of a diachronic conception of biology has rarely been explored during childhood, except by Maurice-Naville and Montangero (1992). The aim of the present study was to further explore this issue. In the course of an interview, 163 children aged between 6 and 11 expressed their diachronic conceptions of the growth and death of several…

We investigated the nature of graphic formulas in 5-, 7-, and 9-year-old children when they were asked to draw a house and a television in a free condition, and then to draw from photographs of these objects. Assuming that the frequency of occurrence of a feature in children's drawings reflects its semantic weight, we studied the relations between…

A study of German-speaking kindergartners and adults replicated Canadian research that found that, although children made more errors than adults in recognizing emotional expressions of photographed faces, they structured emotional concepts just as adults did. (Author/BB)

Two studies examined children's concept acquisition for complex emotions. Four- to seven-year olds described situations that evoke a variety of emotions and their feelings about each; four- and five-year olds rated the same emotions for feelings of pleasure and arousal. Combined results suggest children attain partial conceptualization of each…

Two cognitive tasks (construction of space and recognition of space) were developed to test the emergence of three spatial concepts ("in", "on", and "under"). Subjects were 60 Israeli children between 18 and 30 months of age. Scalogram analysis and analysis of variance confirmed that "in" concepts developed…

Clarified the developmental processes of awareness of relationships between duration, distance, and speed relative to linear movement. Children began with near awareness of the direct relationships between duration and distance and distance and speed. However, correct grasp of these direct relationships seemed to strengthen an incorrect grasp of…

Investigated the hypothesis that preschoolers encode perceptual attributes, but not conceptual attributes, of objects in recall tasks. Children were asked to recall typical and atypical objects, or objects that varied in typicality and size. Children were influenced by both conceptual and perceptual stimulus characteristics. (LB)

A structural model of emotions was used to reveal patterns in how children interpret the emotional facial expressions of others. Tests with young children and adults indicate that children organize the emotional domain in a systematic fashion, initially according to pleasure and arousal and later in terms of adult-like categories. (Author/AS)

Second-, third-, and sixth-grade children (N=48) were presented sets of categorically-related pictures, were either prompted or not prompted to identify categories and later asked to recall categories. Recall time for second- and third-grade prompted children was significantly less than for nonprompted peers. No differences were found with sixth…

Children's memory for stories was examined as a function of subjects' understanding of causal reasoning ability in stories. Results supported a developmental view in which recall performance was a complex interaction between characteristics of the learner and characteristics of the story. (Author/PCB)

Children and adults were asked to place something "in front of" or "behind" a featured or nonfeatured object. Most subjects responded to the object's inherent features. A significant number of adults used the observer orientation cue. Children had more difficulty with the nonfeatured object but also used the observer…

Describes two studies investigating the development of recursive thinking in 60 Dutch children five, seven, and nine years of age. The first study replicated earlier research employing a verbal production procedure. The second study used verbal comprehension procedures and concluded that development appears two years earlier than indicated by the…

Designed to determine whether (1) children of middle socioeconomic status (SES) learn matrix completion rules more rapidly than lower-SES children; (2) feedback influences rate of rule acquisition; (3) rule shifting influences rate of rule acquisition; (4) SES is associated with transfer of training; and (5) effectiveness of rule acquisition and…