This study demonstrated selective "rational" imitation in infants in two testing conditions: in the presence or absence of the model during the response phase. In the study, 14-month-olds were more likely to imitate a tool-use behavior when a prior failed attempt emphasized the logical reason and relevance of introducing this novel means, making…

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds'…

Recent work on adult metacognition indicates that although metacognitive monitoring often guides control operations, sometimes it follows control operations and is based on the feedback from them. Consistent with this view, in self-paced learning, judgments of learning (JOLs) made at the end of each study trial "decreased" with the amount of time…

Second graders were administered a two-choice discrimination task in which irrelevant dimensions were correlated .50, .75, or 1.00 with the 100 percent rewarded cue. Results indicate that learning was most impeded in the .75 condition and was most efficient in the 1.00 condition. These results support the Hypothesis Testing Theory of…

Examines interference in five-year-olds' learning sets by using intertrial and interproblem intervals. It was concluded that intertrial and interproblem intervals differentially affect learning set performance. (Author/CI)

Experiment was designed to teach the oddity principle to preschool age children whose age peers in earlier studies have had difficulty learning the oddity principle. (Authors)

Two experiments found that German-speaking dyslexic 9-year-olds showed impaired learning of pseudonames in several visual-verbal learning tasks, even when phonological retrieval cues were provided and when pseudonames were presented in spoken and printed form. There was no deficit when short, familiar words were used, and no difficulty in…

Six-month-old infants recognize a cue 24 hours after training in the original context but not in a different one. It is demonstrated that this retrieval deficit could be overcome if infants are briefly and passively exposed to a novel context. Concludes that each training episode is encoded in terms of the context in which it occurs. Contains 48…

Reports research demonstrating that fourth-grade subjects could not solve a basic transverse patterning problem involving pairs of geometric forms even after 90 trials. The addition of one nonspatial dimension, however, resulted in solution. Also, the greater the number of nonspatial dimensions present, the better the learning. (Author/SDH)

This study examined age-related differences in functional learning performance manifested among children, adolescents, and young adults placed in a two-cue ecology involving cues with direct relation and inverse relations with the criterion. On each trial, participants were instructed to consider the values taken by two cues, predict from these…