Examined the extent to which children draw upon reality and fantasy, either explicitly or implicitly, in their spontaneous classifications, and when instructed to sort on that basis. (Author/JMB)

First and fifth graders sorted cards into two piles based on the orientation of a T figure. Sorting took place in the presence of irrelevant information which did or did not contrast in line slope with the target, or in the absence of irrelevant information. (Author/JMB)

This study measured the feature selection and classification ability of 213 children between the ages of four and sixteen through an analysis of their sorting performance from a developmental point of view. (CM)

In this study, third and sixth graders were tested in a recognition memory task with short lists of items from either one or two categories to investigate the influence of categorical information on retrieval processes. (Author/SB)

The category item production task was used to obtain child norms and to investigate two alternative types of category bias reputedly shown by young children: (a) underinclusion of appropriate items; and (b) overinclusion of inappropriate items. Preschool and grade school children (n=144) were asked to produce verbal responses to four category…

A sorting presentation procedure was used to study the effects of three classification schemes (self-generated, thematic, or taxonomic) on the organized free recall of second and fifth graders. (Author/SB)

A negative transfer paradigm was used to assess kindergarten, third-, and sixth-grade children's use of category relations in lists presented for recall. Results showed that negative transfer effects increased with age, with kindergarten children showing no evidence of interference relative to a control group. (Author/MP)

Examines the effectiveness of training children from grades 3 through 7 to organize information to be recalled into predetermined class inclusion hierarchies. Examines the effect of this training on performance on a transfer task requiring subjective organization. (BD)

An alternating sort-recall procedure was used in three experiments to train third-, fifth-, and seventh-grade students in the use of organizational techniques as memory aids. (Author/JMB)

This paper describes studies which investigated the nature of the relationship between number of categories and recall performance in children, and attempted to determine whether the category-recall effect increases developmentally. A series of three studies was designed so that grade level and stimulus difficulty would not be confounded.…

Investigates three alternative explanations for why younger children benefit more than older children from the provision of category size information when recalling items from a categorized list. Subjects were 29 kindergarten and 30 third grade children. (MP)

Evaluates possible differences in the cognitive representations of semantic categories between children and adults independent of spontaneous memory skills. Response latencies on a classification task were compared for second, fourth, and sixth grades and college students. (Author/MP)

Two studies explored the hypothesis that young children perceive integrally some stimuli that older children perceive separably. In both experiments, kindergarten, second- and fifth-grade children were required to classify sets of stimuli that varied in size and brightness. (SB)

Subjects were 72 first, third and fifth graders. Stimuli consisted of an initial set of 20 unrelated pictures, and a second set of 20 pictures which could be classified according to four superordinate categories. (MS)