The objective of this study was to describe the developmental progression of counterfactual reasoning from childhood to adulthood. In contrast to the traditional view, it was recently reported by Rafetseder and colleagues that even a majority of 6-year-old children do not engage in counterfactual reasoning when asked counterfactual questions…

We present two studies that examined developmental differences in the implicit and explicit acquisition of category knowledge. College-attending adults consistently outperformed school-age children on two separate information-integration paradigms due to children's more frequent use of an explicit rule-based strategy. Accuracy rates were also…

Previous research has suggested that a mid-band of spatial frequencies is critical to face recognition in adults, but few studies have explored the development of this bias in children. We present a paradigm adapted from the adult literature to test spatial frequency biases throughout development. Faces were presented on a screen with particular…

Several models assume that working memory development depends on age-related increases in efficiency and speed of processing. However, age-related increases in the efficiency of the mechanisms that counteract forgetting and restore memory traces may also be important. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments by manipulating both the…

In this study, 2.5-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (N=108) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which background context was manipulated. During the learning phase of each trial, children were presented with exemplars in one or multiple background contexts. At the test, children were asked to generalize to a novel exemplar in either the same…

Describes psychological approaches to study of cognition and emotion, identifies issues that may provide direction to understanding the organization and integration of cognition and emotion in development. Maintains that an integrative model for the study of "cogmotion" is needed, suggesting that cogmotion research will contribute to the exchange…

Examined evidence for transitions in first and second graders' analogical reasoning, over a six-month period. Found strong evidence for bimodality in test performance frequency distributions and weaker evidence for inaccessibility in frequency distributions. Transitional subjects showed a temporary increase of inconsistent solution behavior and…

This study examined age-related change in the ability to inhibit responses using two varieties of the stop signal paradigm. Three age groups (29 7-year-olds, 24 10-year-olds, and 28 young adults) performed first on a visual choice reaction task in which the spatial mapping between the go signal and response was varied between blocks. The choice…

Examined relationships between three components of tasks used in developmental studies of attention--visual search, filtering, and priming--as measured in tasks performed by children and adults. (PCB)

Recounts 3 experiments providing evidence against 2 interpretations of previous research findings that explicit memory develops substantially from 3 years of age to adulthood while implicit memory remains stable. Argues that the implicit-explicit memory developmental dissociation reflects differences in strategic processing (strategy use and…

Presents evidence supporting claim that sex and gender are important to the explanatory as well as the descriptive goals of developmental psychology. Maintains that studying psychosocial and biological components of gender and sex helps one to develop hypotheses about causal mechanisms for developmental outcomes more generally. Introduces the…

The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural information in this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adults needed to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participants needed to recognize the emotion displayed by…

Used path analysis in two experiments to examine possibility that age difference in infants' long-term retention were artifacts of correlated differences in learning rates or learning opportunities. Found that developmental declines in forgetting rates between 12 and 18 months were independent of developmental differences in learning. Age…

Investigated intra-individual development of ability to modify the size of a human figure drawing. Found through longitudinal data that children between ages 7 and 9 were able to reduce drawing size. Discovered that the larger the figure initially, the more complex the level of spatial axes system, and the more persons in the picture, the greater…

Three hypotheses were tested about how children and adults construct intuitive models when encountering a new property. Causal models showed that 10-, 13-, and 19-year-olds transferred principles from familiar property to novel property. None used default model. Younger children's models were affected by domain. Findings suggest that the transfer…