Accumulating evidence suggests that North Americans tend to focus on central objects whereas East Asians tend to pay more attention to contextual information in a visual scene. Although it is generally believed that such culturally divergent attention tendencies develop through socialization, existing evidence largely depends on adult samples.…

Pascual-Leone's neo-Piagetian theory of development is used to predict the pre- and postinstruction distributions of scores on a subject-controlled digit placement task as a function of three parameters dealing with mental strategy and capacity. (Author/ED)

Four- to 11-year-olds made duration, distance, and speed judgments on Piagetian tasks where cars ran on parallel tracks. Among younger children, duration and distance judgments had approximately the same difficulty. Among older children, distance judgments were easier than duration judgments, and symmetry of effects of temporal and spatial…

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…

A total of 100 children from divorced and separated families were compared with 100 children from intact families in this investigation of ways in which children handle the concepts of family membership and relationships. Children were given two social and two physical tasks: a family identity task; Piaget's interview for determining the…

The use of rules on nonverbal balance scale problems was studied among 5- to 19-year-olds. Latent class analyses indicated that children used rules, that different rules were used by children of different ages, and that both consistent and inconsistent rule use occurred. A model for the development of reasoning about the balance scale task was…

A proposed study of the differences in the way children perceive, approach, and behave in problem-solving situations is described. The behavioral measure to be used is "glancing," which has been related to outerdirectedness. Children will be given two sets of two puzzles to put together. On the basis of the number of glances and the situation in…

Investigates the development and production of spatial deictic terms ("this/that", "here/there", "my/your") in the context of a hide-and-seek game using preschool children and college age adults. (Author/ED)

Reports on three studies which investigated the development of the concept of horizontality in subjects from nursey school through college age. Normative data collected allowed for evaluation of Piaget's stages and for differences due to age, sex, and apparatus shape and orientation. (ED)

An investigation of Piaget's theory of object concept development through a series of six tasks administered in a combined longitudinal/cross-sectional design (which incorporated a number of methodological controls). Subjects were 36 infants who received the six tasks during each of three testing sessions over a 6-month period. (Author/ED)

Studied the ability of 8- and 11-year olds, and college-age subjects, to allocate attention rapidly. Older subjects were better able to reallocate attention. The developmental change in the reallocation of attention appears to be continuous and quantitative. Improvement is linked to the ability to use active attentional strategies. (Author/GH)

Three longitudinal studies examined means-ends behavior of 6- to 8-month olds. Found that intentional means-end behavior increased between 6 and 7 months, with 7-month olds' performance influenced by the presence of a toy on the cloth. Performance was the same when cloth was attached to or separate from the toy. By 8 months, infants adjusted…

Piaget and Inhelder, in The Child's Conception of Space (1956), described the coordination of viewpoints (CV) spatial operation as one of the prerequisites to the development of the rotation and development (RD) spatial operation. This study investigated this developmental dependency notion and also evaluated the effects of age and sex on the…

Three samples of 8- to 16-year olds were assessed three times at yearly intervals on eight water-level items. Within-child change over age was viewed as stochastic process of the child changing or remaining in one of three latent strategy states. Although there was improvement in task performance over age, the general finding was that strategy…