Research on early physical reasoning has shown surprising discontinuities in developmental trajectories. Infants possess some skills that seem to disappear and then re-emerge in childhood. It has been suggested that prediction skills required in search tasks might cause these discontinuities (Keen, 2003). We tested 3.5- to 5-year-olds'…

We evaluate the hypothesis that children's diagnostic causal reasoning becomes more sophisticated as their understanding of uncertainty advances. When the causal status of candidate causes was known, 3- and 4-year-olds were capable of diagnostic inference (Experiment 1) and could revise their beliefs when told their initial diagnosis was incorrect…

Research on mother-child reminiscing as a socializing practice for autobiographical memory is extended from early childhood and the narrating of single events to adolescence and the narrating of an entire life story. To explore whether the development of the life story in adolescence depends on qualities of the narrator or on the brevity of the…

The theory of constructive operators was used as a framework to design two versions of a paradigm (color matching task, CMT) in which items are parametrically ordered in difficulty, and differ only contextually. Items in CMT-Balloon are facilitating, whereas items in CMT-Clown contain misleading cues. Participants of ages 7-14 years and adults (N…

Young children's integration of weight and distance information was examined using a new methodology that combines a single-armed apparatus with functional measurement. Weight and distance values were varied factorially across the item set. Children estimated how far the beam would tilt when different numbers of weights were placed at different…

Items studied as pictures are better remembered than items studied as words even when test items are presented as words. The present study examined the development of this picture superiority effect in recognition memory. Four groups ranging in age from 7 to 20 years participated. They studied words and pictures, with test stimuli always presented…

Examined development of ability to inhibit thoughts within free speech by manipulating the content requirements of overt streams-of-consciousness. Investigation with kindergartners, second graders, fifth graders, and adults revealed a developmental improvement in inhibitory ability over the middle-childhood years; results are consistent with…

Two experiments examined theory of mind in middle childhood by examining changes in the organization of mental verbs of knowing. Found that older children and comprehension monitors placed greater emphasis on the certainty aspects of mental activity than did younger children and comprehension nonmonitors, suggesting that important aspects of a…

Classified children's use of cognitive strategies on a multitrial sort-recall task. Compared to fourth graders, more second and third graders were classified utilizationally deficient; fourth graders were more likely to be classified as quasi-utilizationally deficient. Levels of recall and clustering were higher for younger utilizationally…

Switching between tasks produces decreases in performance as compared to repeating the same task. Asymmetrical switch costs occur when switching between two tasks of unequal difficulty. This asymmetry occurs because the cost is greater when switching to the less difficult task than when switching to the more difficult task. Various theories about…

Implicit understanding of false belief was investigated by monitoring where preschoolers looked in anticipation of a protagonist reappearing, when the protagonist mistakenly thinks that his desired object is in a different place from where it really is. Two-year olds erroneously looked at the object's real location whereas most older children…

The basis of young children's performance of judgments of recency and frequency was investigated using a modified version of Huppert and Piercy's [Huppert, F. A., & Piercy, M. (1978). The role of trace strength in recency and frequency judgements by amnesic and control subjects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 30, 347-354]…

Children's reported use of single and multiple search strategies during a matching numbers task, along with accompanying verbal (private speech, self-talk) and motoric (finger pointing, place-holding) strategic behaviors were examined with a large, nationally representative cross-sectional sample ("n"=1,979) of children between the ages of 5 and…

A cross-sectional study examined the effect of meaning frequency, referred to as ''dominance'' in the semantic priming paradigm, where ambiguous words (primes) were processed in isolation. Participants made lexical decisions to target words that were associates of the more frequent (dominant) or less frequent (subordinate) meaning of a homograph…

Children, ages 4 through 10, predicted exam performance of stimulus students using information about both motivation and ability as well as about either motivation or ability alone. Age did not emerge as the main determinant of response consistency. Children gave greater weight to positive than to negative motivation but equal weight to both…