Recent studies of adults have found evidence for consolidation effects in the acquisition of novel words, but little is known about whether such effects are found developmentally. In two experiments, we familiarized children with novel nonwords (e.g., "biscal") and tested their recognition and recall of these items. In Experiment 1, 7-year-olds…

Performance of reaction time (RT) tasks was investigated in young children and adults to test the hypothesis that age-related differences in processing speed supersede a "global" mechanism and are a function of specific differences in task demands and processing requirements. The sample consisted of 54 4-year-olds, 53 5-year-olds, 59…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether and which aspects of a concurrent motor activity can facilitate children's and adults' performance in a dynamic imagery task. Children (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds) and adults were asked to tilt empty glasses, filled with varied amounts of imaginary water, so that the imagined water would reach the rim.…

The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether age differences noted when two tasks are performed concurrently can be accounted for in terms of age differences in single task baseline performance. Subjects were two groups of 12 eight-year-olds, and one group of 12 thirteen-year-olds. (CM)

Results obtained from adults and 8-, 10-, 12- and 14-year-olds indicate that children's advantage for repeated stimuli in reaction-time tasks and the decrease in magnitude of the repetition effect as age increases can be attributed to repetition of the same stimulus, rather than repetition of the same response. (MP)

Examined effects of age and degree of learning on children's susceptibility to retroactive interference. Found that children who participated repeatedly in target game recognized more information from that game than children who participated once. Both 4- and 7-year-olds were susceptible to retroactive interference; susceptibility was not affected…

This study measured the feature selection and classification ability of 213 children between the ages of four and sixteen through an analysis of their sorting performance from a developmental point of view. (CM)

A new method is introduced for assessing children's component selection--i.e., the disposition to attend to a single feature of multifaceted stimuli. (Authors)

Experiments were conducted to determine the influence upon task difficulty of these factors: age; percentage of redundancy between relevant and irrelevant cues; saliency of reinforcement, discriminability of relevant nonpreferred dimension, and learning set pretraining to reject preferred irrelevant dimensions. (Author/AJ)

Conducted with fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders, this study was designed to extend investigation of the contradictory training paradigm of the O'Brien and Overton study (1980) to include performances with conditional syllogisms and to bring this effect to bear on the controversies of false positive and negative assessments at different ages.…

Three studies investigated how experiencing nearby locations together in time influenced memory for location in 7-, 9-, and 11- year-olds and adults. Findings suggested that experiencing nearby locations together in time increased the weight children assigned to categorical information in their later estimates of location. Results were similar…

Examined how developmental differences in perceptual and conceptual priming between 8 and 19 years coincide with differences between familiarity and recollective responses on explicit memory tests employing the Remember/Know paradigm. Found few age-group differences in perceptual priming following a levels-of-processing encoding manipulation. In…

Two experiments investigated the contribution of automatic and intentional memory processes to 5- and 8-year-olds' acceptance of misinformation either read to them or self-generated from semantic and perceptual hints. Results from recognition tests conducted under two instructional conditions suggested that both automaticity and recollection…

Three experiments examined 5- to 8-year-olds' ability to make tentative interpretations of ambiguous messages. It was concluded that although 5- and 6-year-olds' interpretations of ambiguous messages were not tentative at the outset, they were able to use source monitoring skills to treat them as tentative retrospectively, at least over short time…

Explores effects on one child of observing another same-sex child receive direct reinforcement. Subjects were 216 children from different age levels (6.11, 9.1, and 11.2 years). Results were considered in terms of vicarious reinforcement and the "implicit punishment" hypothesis. (Author/CI)