Functional connectivity within and between Intrinsic Connectivity Networks (ICNs) transforms over development and is thought to support high order cognitive functions. But how variable is this process, and does it diverge with altered cognitive development? We investigated age-related changes in integration and segregation within and between ICNs…

Socially savvy individuals track what they know and what other people likely know, and they use this information to navigate the social world. We examine whether children expect people to have shared knowledge based on their social relationships (e.g., expecting friends to know each other's secrets, expecting members of the same cultural group to…

Previous research has shown that when learning categories, adults and young children allocate attention differently. Adults tend to attend selectively, focusing primarily on the most relevant information, whereas young children tend to distribute their attention broadly. Although selective attention is useful in many situations, it also has costs.…

Explaining inconsistency may serve as an important mechanism for driving the process of causal learning. But how might this process generate amended beliefs? One way that explaining inconsistency may promote discovery is by guiding exploratory, hypothesis-testing behavior. In order to investigate this, a study with young children ranging in age…

Previous research suggests that 3-year-olds fail to learn from statistical data when their prior beliefs conflict with evidence. Are children's beliefs entrenched in their folk theories, or can preschoolers rationally update their beliefs? Motivated by a Bayesian account, we conducted a training study to investigate this question. Children (45…

Kuhn and Pease (p. 279, this issue) provide evidence for a change in learning as a result of increasing executive control during later childhood. Although the ability to inhibit information that biases answers in a reasoning task may account for their findings, the opportunity to gain specific experiences and engage different strategies in…

This study investigated age differences in the way in which attentional resources are allocated to expository text and whether these differences are moderated by content preexposure. The organization of the preexposure materials was manipulated to test the hypothesis that a change in organization across two presentations would evoke more…

Suggests an increase with age in children's ability to focus on essential content from a media presentation. Children in early adolescence seemed better able than younger ones to ignore nonessential information. (WY)

Descriptions of cognitive development are determined by the metamodel on which theories and data are based. The associative and information processing approaches have generated much of the research on adult learning and memory. A contextual approach, emphasizing perceiving, comprehending, and remembering, is emerging in the present historical…

In a 1964 investigation of the effects of age and memory on problem solving, using subjects from age three to age nineteen, it was found that the youngest and oldest subjects performed a three-choice probabilistic task significantly different from the "middle-age" children (7 to 9 years old). The three-choice task was an apparatus with a…

This series of studies was concerned with developmental changes in memory organization. Denney & Ziobrowski's (1972) "complementary-similarity" shift with age in the bases of encoding for memory was investigated with two new paradigms which assessed memory performance for the same stimulus materials within the same subjects. No evidence was found…

Two studies examined age-related change in proactive interference from previously learned material. The meta-analysis of 26 studies indicated that proactive interference decreased with age. The cross-sectional study found that third through sixth graders' and college students' recall was accurate on Trial 1, but became less so over Trials 2…

The study paired-associate (PA) learning via the anticipation (ANT) and study-test (ST) procedures across second, third, fourth and fifth grades. Specifically, age differences in the rate of learning and examining PA learning according to the stage analyses were examined. Retention was also of interest: however, a ceiling effect negated the…

This paper describes and discusses three studies concerned with the representation of children's knowledge as revealed in the ways that children, ages 5 to 17, perform a scientific induction task. A variant of Piaget's balance scale prediction problem was chosen as the experimental task; a formal model for different levels of children's knowledge…

A group of young and elderly females were tested on a paired-associate task. The results indicated that older individuals made more intrusion errors on the CVCs high in AV on the Glaze norms but low on the Archer norms. (Author)