Children between the ages of three and six years were asked to predict their success or failure in two tasks, each of which had five difficulty levels. Tasks were presented either simultaneously or successively. Results indicated that children made realistic assessments of their chances for success at the difficulty levels. Performance factors are…

Reports two experiments examining the contents and accessibility of a subset of the knowledge represented in long-term memory by preschool-age children. The knowledge domain of object locations in the home was selected for study. Among the results, very young children revealed considerable knowledge in this domain. (Author/RH)

Examined 4-year olds' strategy development using a new kind of "same-different" judgment task that minimized memory demands. Found that children's spontaneous behavior was highly strategic, and over trials it developed differently for "same" and "different" trials. Most children who did not spontaneously use the most…

Studies 58 children ages eight to nine years who were classified as good and poor readers on the basis of their proofreading two passages varying in level of difficulty. Misspellings were introduced by transposing two adjacent letters in the word "the," other three-letter words, and longer words. (Author/CI)

Previous findings of a developmental trend from holistic to analytic modes of processing are subject to two possible interpretations: the ability to analyze according to dimensions increases with age, or a production deficiency for the strategy of analyzing decreases with age. This study tests these interpretations through an examination of…

Three experiments investigated effects of complexity on 2- to 6-year-olds' understanding of a beam balance. Found that 2- to 4-year-olds succeeded on problems that entailed binary relations, but 5- and 6-year-olds also succeeded on problems that entailed ternary relations. Ternary relations tasks from other domains (transitivity and class…

Evaluates autistic children's affect and rate of task acquisition under three experimental conditions: constant task, varied acquisition task, and varied with maintenance task. Results showed significantly more efficient learning under the varied maintenance condition. (Author/CI)

With first-grade and college students, examines barrier effects as a function of the task used to assess subjects' cognitive maps. One group, asked to give rank-ordering judgments, had to keep an entire spatial layout in mind. The second group made direct estimates of the distance between two objects. (RH)

Preschoolers presented with a difficult match-to-sample task requiring task analysis performed successfully when taught to overtly ask themselves questions about the salient features of each display and then answer the questions. Most subjects performed poorly when told not to use the self-questions and answers, but performed well again when…

Three studies examined the hypotheses that: (1) codability and not extent of distance determines difficulty; (2) critical features and not whole objects are coded; and (3) implicit perceptual axes provide a frame of reference for coding the display. Results supporting these hypotheses are discussed in terms of a description of spatial…

Results suggest that modeling can indeed affect the complexity of children's sentences even in the absence of reinforcement or instructions of imitate. (Authors)

Four experiments investigated the development of visuomotor control in sequential pointing in tasks varying in difficulty among 6- to 10-year-olds and adults. Comparisons across difficulty levels and ages suggest that motor development is not a uniform fine-tuning of stable strategies. Findings raise argument for stage characteristics of…

Using information contained in nine photographs, young children constructed a wooden pyramid. Control children were given the same task but no pictorial information. Children's performances were significantly better when pictorial information was available. Sex and age differences were noted regarding strategies used to complete the task.…

Compared coupling characteristics of clapping simultaneous with walking or galloping, consistency across trials, and phasing variability among 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-olds. Found that for walk/clap tasks, children adopted adult-like coupling patterns by age 8 and with the same consistency by age 10. Across age, children became less variable in…

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…