Explores implications of two cognitive development perspectives for characterizing ontogeny of causal reasoning. Reviews literature on causal reasoning in the preschool years and concludes that the hypothesis of an invariant causal scheme is only partially correct. (Author/SO)

Critically reviews research on developmental differences in reactions to the physically disabled in order to illustrate age-related influences and to provide a clearer conceptualization of such reactions. (Author/CM)

Explores age differences in children's conceptions of play, pretending, and toys. Examines parallel structural changes in other areas of development, such as language acquisition. Subjects for the study were 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children. (BD)

Presents a developmental study of changes in infant attachment behaviors. Five groups of female infants, 8, 11, 14, 19, and 24 months of age, were observed during varying types of separation experiences. Changes in proximity behaviors and contact behaviors were analyzed. (BD)

This paper examines structural paradigms for the analysis of narratives drawn from Levi-Strauss, Propp and Piaget. It shows that all are successful in differentiating between the stories freely told by children of different age levels ranging from 2 to 12 years. (MS)

Several experiments with 8- to 9-year-old children are reported to demonstrate that "decalage" observed between success in problems of conservation of weight, volume, and density is due to the different task situation as presented by Piaget and Inhelder. (Author)

A dialectical schemata framework was used to interpret, code, and compare 27 interviews on the nature of education with freshmen, seniors and faculty members at a small, highly selective liberal arts college in order to provide a description of the organization of dialectical thinking and its presence in mature thought. (Author/DB)

Biological theories of adaptation are used to generate a model of human cognitive development in which physiological and cognitive change in aged persons can be understood as an adaptive stage of development. Related literature is reviewed that focuses on the elderly as information transmitters and on the psychology of "telling."…

Examination of the way in which children conceive the development of animals shows that there are parallels among concepts of development with those of the periods of concrete operations and formal operations. The conception of development seems to advance further in the subsequent period of dialectical thought. (MS)