In Giyoo Hatano's passing, we have lost an esteemed colleague and a treasured friend. Among his many contributions to our field, our work, and our lives, we honor and build on his and his colleagues' work on conceptual growth. We liken the view developed by Hatano and his colleagues to Toulmin's evolutionary scheme for understanding conceptual…

This annotated bibliography lists the few published studies of Piaget's theory of nominal realism in children. (Author/SJL)

Reviews "The Mind's Staircase: Exploring the Conceptual Underpinnings of Children's Thought and Knowledge," edited by Robbie Case. A main thesis of the book, which discusses theoretical issues and presents empirical evidence, is that children's cognitive development is guided by central conceptual structures, or networks of concepts that…

To learn how children acquire "metalinguistic competence," the development of the concept of "the word" was experimentally studied in four- to ten-year-olds. (Author/SDH)

The present study was designed to explore the relationship between the theoretical models of cognitive development proposed by L. S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget. One hundred and four subjects aged four to sixteen years were selected. All subjects were in the average range of intelligence, were in the usual school grade for their age, and had no history…

Reviews studies, using animals and children, of the development and operation of the intuitive time sense, the "biological clock." (SJL)

Examines a general developmental hypothesis concerned with children's understanding of perceptual experience, memory, intentions, and emotions. It is hypothesized that young children view the mind as passive in relation to the external world and regard external events as determining subjective experience, whereas older children know many ways that…

Discusses hierarchical complexity of tasks as a way of conceptualizing information in terms of the power required to complete a task, and its implications for developmental psychology and information science. Provides an analytic solution to the definition of developmental stages and allows for the possibility within the science of scaling the…

Studies concerned with the synchronous emergence prediction of Piaget's structures-of-the-whole principle are discussed in conjunction with three groups of concrete-operational skills: (1) transitivity/conservation/class inclusion; (2) double classification/double seriation; and (3) ordinal, cardinal, and natural number concepts. Findings show…

First-, third- and fifth-grade children participated in a study of information seeking, using a "Twenty Questions" procedure with a hierarchical array of pictures. Economy of inquiry increased with grade but was unaffected by practice, replaying a game, or observing a model. Age differences in types of questions reflected differences in…

Extends William James' classification of phenomenalistic reality (PR) and analyzes PR using empirical data available in developmental psychology; focuses on the relation of PR to a human subject; to rational constructions; and to the idea of truth. Concludes that the development of phenomenalistic reality is qualitatively different from the…

Based on the papers presented at the 1996 Symposium of the Jean Piaget Society and highlighting the extent to which Piaget's ideas have served to scaffold contemporary thinking about every aspect of conceptual development, this volume examines the nature of conceptual development, its foundations, and the sources of its novelties. The chapters…

A study of young children's art and representational thought investigated the order in which representational concepts emerge in children's modeling in clay. It was predicted that children's three-dimensional representations of simple, symmetrical, and balanced familiar objects would be superior to their representations of complex, asymmetrical,…

In order to determine the cognitive development of Navajo children in terms of Piagetian conservation of number, mass, and continuous quantity, 168 Navajo children at seven different age levels from 5 to adult were presented with a series of three conservation tasks. The tasks consisted of a standard object and an equivalent object that could be…

Attempts to express a group of children's understanding of inversion, retrograde, and retrograde-inversion as it applies to musical composition and color schemes. The children, ages six to nine, displayed idiosyncratic approaches to the problems. Discusses the possible implications for symbolic language and cognitive development. (MJP)