Time attitudes (TA) are evaluative feelings toward the past, present and future. Given the role of TA in psychological and behavioral outcomes, the aim of this study was to analyze the adequacy of the Adolescent Time Inventory-Time Attitudes (ATI-TA) scale among adolescents and young adults in Italy. The scale was administered to 638 students in…

Children's ability to recognize emotional expressions from faces and bodies develops during childhood. However, the low-level features that support accurate body emotion recognition during development have not been well characterized. This is in marked contrast to facial emotion recognition, which is known to depend upon specific spatial frequency…

Despite much research on Chinese children's learning achievement, little research exists on their early development of beliefs about learning. This study examined the perceptions of purposes for and affective and value expression toward learning among 129 Chinese preschoolers aged 3-6 years. To tap culturally valid perspectives, free narratives…

In two separate task conditions, cells of a matrix could be filled either by taking account of only one dimension or by considering both dimensions. Subjects were 80 children 3 to 6 years of age. The majority of three-year-olds failed the two-attribute condition and there was a significant interaction between age and experimental condition.…

Investigated the relation between age and rate of forgetting in 72 three-, four-, and six-year-olds in a task that eliminated differences in level of initial learning. Rate of forgetting was nearly identical in every age group. (RJC)

Two studies on M-capacity found factor-analytical and correlational evidence that five M-capacity tests share a common source of variance and that, as subjects' increase in age, scores increase at a similar rate. Results suggest that, in the 6-11 age range, M-capacity can be measured with a battery of tests. (AA)

Preschool children were given a memory task that required repeating a list of animal names and a sentence imitation task. Results confirmed a relationship between word span and language imitation in younger preschool children and the notion of a memory constraint on early spontaneous language. Increasing mastery of linguistic rules appeared to…

Examined relationships among working memory, memory span, and reading skills in children and adults. Found that working memory and short-term memory skills develop through adolescence, but working memory skills show declines in adulthood. Age-related declines in memory appear to be related to the task's processing demands, which may affect the…

Examined whether speech rate is related to the amount recalled and if developmental increases in speech rate allow faster rehearsal with age, and hence, greater recall. Found that the group relationship was clear and replicable but that speech rates of individual children were not good predictors of those children's memory spans; age was found to…

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…

Two experiments examined the development of children's memory for spatial location or color. Results refuted the proposal that in contrast to color, spatial location would not show developmental improvement because it is remembered automatically. Suggests that, for the age range studied, there was developmental change in the efficiency of…

Investigated development of working memory in the transitional period from infancy to preschool years. The age-related increase in scores on the Imitation Sorting Task (IST) appeared to be about one unit every six months. Results suggest that the IST has a good construct validity. (AA)

Four experiments investigated phonemic and visual similarity effects in 5- and 10-year olds. Results suggested that young children rely on modality-dependent codes, which are probably automatically activated, and do not use a speech-based memory code for drawings and words. This pattern of findings appeared to be independent of culture and…

Examines subjects' processing in misleading test items. Suggests that the M-power for children, when assessed behaviorally, may increase with age in a discrete manner, and have the potential to generate interval scales of measurement. In addition, suggests that, in light of the results, what statisticians often consider "error of…