The present studies (N = 159) investigated children's and adults' preferences for label and property conjunctions for cross-classifiable toys. In Study 1, 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, and adults participated in a labelling and property attribution task involving experimental toys that belong to two categories and control toys that belong to only one…

Although children enact third-party punishment, at least in response to harm and fairness violations, much remains unknown about this behavior. We investigated the tendency to make the punishment fit the crime in terms of moral domain; developmental patterns across moral domains; the effects of audience and descriptive norm violations; and…

The current study examined the effects of grade level and object size on the ability to estimate the measurement of objects. Fifth- (n = 198) and sixth-grade (n = 208) students and freshman undergraduate students (n = 71) from Taipei city, Taiwan, participated in the study. The findings indicated a tendency for measurement estimation ability to…

Sex is a significant social category, and adults derive information about it from both faces and bodies. Research indicates that young infants process sex category information in faces. However, no prior study has examined whether infants derive sex categories from bodies and match faces and bodies in terms of sex. In the current study,…

Under what conditions will people generalize and remember observed social information? Preschool- (n = 44) and young school-age (n = 46) children and adults (n = 40) heard short vignettes describing characters' actions and motives on a single occasion. Characters were introduced using either proper names or category labels. Test questions asked…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine differences in the development of conflict management strategies, focusing on 3- and 5-year-olds, through a comparison of 3 neighboring Asian cultures, those of China (n = 114), Japan (n = 98), and Korea (n = 90). The dual concern model of conflict management was adopted to probe which…

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, throughout their careers, college graduates change multiple jobs and several careers, often remotely related to one another or to their major field of study. Experts project that the majority of newly created jobs requiring college education would involve extensive and prolonged on-the-job training of…

The developmental change from global toward dimensional classifications, usually observed in vision, was investigated in haptics with stimuli varying according to their size and roughness. Results indicated that, although more overall similarity classifications were observed in children than in adults, this kind of classification was never…

As children grow older they show an increasing preference for classifying objects on the basis of shape rather than color. To clarify the nature of this "dimension preference," children of ages 3 1/2 to 6 1/2 years were given a method of triads test of dimension preferences, followed (after a week's delay) by a component selection task. The most…

Coordination and integration of class information was examined using a multidimensional similarity judgment task in which four- and nine-year-old children rated the similarity of pairs of stimuli sharing either one or two attribute values. (Author/MP)

This study investigates the developmental changes that occur in the attending behavior of children engaged in a relatively simple classification task, and attempts to reaffirm the existence of developmental changes in stimulus preferences and in the ability to employ double classification systems. Subjects were 24 preschool and 24 first grade…

Children's performance on multidimensional classification tasks was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, preschool, first-, and third-grade children were shown a standard stimulus and were then asked to judge whether several comparison stimuli were the same as or different from the standard. Comparison stimuli differed from the standard…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…