To test general and specific processes of symbol learning, 4- and 5-year-old children learned three kinds of abstract associates for novel objects: words, facts, and pictograms. To test fast mapping (i.e., one-trial learning) and subsequent learning, comprehension was tested after each of four exposures. Production was also tested, as was…

The aim of the current study was to investigate the performance of 6-, 8-, and 14-year-olds on an analogy-making task involving analogies in which there are competing perceptual and relational matches. We hypothesized that the selection of the common relational structure requires the inhibition of other salient features, in particular, perceptual…

Second and sixth graders acquired information about a large-scale environment either actively or passively. They were subsequently asked to estimate distances in either active or passive response style. Unlike the older children, second graders did not estimate distances accurately when acquisition and response activities were incongruent.…

Reyna and Brainerd supplement arguments they made previously in this issue by advancing five additional reasons for preferring output-interference explanations over the resources hypothesis. (RH)

Three experiments investigated the dynamics of human infant visual fixation. Results showed that, over a series of trials, four-month-olds fixate longer on a complex than on a simple stimulus. Findings challenge prevailing cognitive-schema theories as a complete account of the dynamics of infant visual fixation. A two-process theory that accounts…

Findings indicated that: (1) 10- and 13-year-olds had difficulty accepting contrary-to-fact premises as a basis for reasoning; (2) 15- and 18-year-olds found reasoning correctly more difficult with contrary-to-fact premises; and (3) among 5- and 7-year-olds, a fantasy context decreased the extent to which empirical knowledge interfered with…

This response to Brainerd and Reyna's paper (in this issue) argues that the common resources hypothesis can be applied to a wider range of phenomena than can the output-interference hypothesis. Presents results of a dual-task experiment under bidirectional deficits. Concludes that dual-task studies do not provide critical tests of the resources…

Examines the effects of integration complexity on the ability of child and adult listeners to integrate information. Increases in complexity adversely affected children's more than adults' resolution integration. The children's integration performance was affected by theme discontinuity and conferential complexity. (Author/AS)

Reports three experiments with kindergartners and first graders which used one-trial multidimensional reasoning tasks like those of Toppino (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, v30, p496-512, 1980). Feedback information and preliminary experience with simple forms of the task produced high performance levels, and verbal labeling in the…

Infants 8.5 and 9.5 months of age were tested for ability to determine the location of an object hidden in one of two covered containers before their left-right positions were reversed. Only the older infants provided with different colored covers to their containers were able to do this task. (Author/DB)

Showed that in a task requiring judgments about the concept of "more" based on the relative numerosity of sets, three- to four-year-old children may base their judgments on such parameters as the extent to which the sets are homogeneous with respect to the color of their components. (Author/DB)

Three experimental tasks were devised to assess the nature of memory processing limitations in fourth-graders' oral reading comprehension. (Author/MP)

Results of five experiments showed that in certain situations recall varied with processing difficulty for both children and college students. This was primarily due to enhanced cue discriminability. The relation between processing difficulty and developmental increases in recall seemed to be mediated by constructability problems and resource- and…

Examined potential central processing strategy differences among subgroups of children on a series of elaborative encoding tasks. Children in lower verbal and learning ability subgroups differed from those in higher ability groups in how they shared, discriminated, and selectively allocated resources between recall tasks. (RH)

Two experiments examined developmental changes in reasoning about intensive quantities--predicting mixture intensity of pairs of liquids with different intensities of red color. Results showed that cognitive averaging in this domain developed late and slowly. Predominating up to 12 years was an extensivity bias, a strong tendency to use rules that…