The use of a verbal rehearsal strategy (repeating the items to be remembered to oneself in serial order) has been identified as a key factor in explaining working memory (WM) development. However, the debate remains open with regard to the age at which children are able to use it, and the actual benefits of using such a strategy. Numerous…

"Patterning" is a cognitive intervention that is unknown to psychologists, but has nevertheless been taught for half a century in nearly all kindergartens and many preschools in English-speaking countries. Patterning is the understanding that a certain rule governs the sequence of items in a series. At the simplest level, if the series…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Children's imitation of adults plays a prominent role in human cognitive development. However, few studies have investigated how children represent the complex structure of observed actions which underlies their imitation. We integrate theories of action segmentation, memory, and imitation to investigate whether children's event representation is…

When placing numbers along a number line with endpoints 0 and 1000, children generally space numbers logarithmically until around the age of 7, when they shift to a predominantly linear pattern of responding. This developmental shift of responding on the number placement task has been argued to be indicative of a shift in the format of the…

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of sequence relations and the process of mental rotation in four-year-olds. Subjects were 12 preschool children who were tested individually. They were given a State Comparison Task (SCT) in which they were shown pairs of animal pictures, half identical and half mirror images of one another,…

This study focused on the developmental ability of 5, 7, ll, and 19 year olds to use a cognitive strategy to recall a series of eight movements under conditions of randomness, order, or randomness with training to organize. Results are discussed. (Author/MT)

Strategies young children used to correct errors in nesting seriated cups changed substantially with age, becoming increasingly more flexible and involving more extensive restructuring of the relationships among the cups. The same trend toward increasing flexibility of thought and action also appeared in procedures children used to combine the…

The development and application of a learning procedure for the seriation structure of children in the oscilatory state are described. The procedure was based on the structural genetic theory of learning. A study consisting of design and verification stages was carried out in Cali, Colombia. In the design stage six seriation treatments involving…

Examines the issue of object sorting in early infancy. Forty-eight infants at 6, 9, and 12 months were presented with eight sets of small, manipulable objects. At six months, selective manipulation was absent; at nine months, 94 percent of the infants sequentially touched similar objects and at 12 months 100 percent did so. (Author/DB)

Matrix tasks to assess multiple classifications and multiple seriation skills were administered to 160 children (40 Ss each from preschool, kindergarten, first and second grade levels). Each child received six matrix subtasks (reproduction and transportation of cross classification I, double seriation, and cross classification II) in one of six…

Investigates the influence of logical skills (inclusion and seriation) on the degree and kind of semantic integration performed on remembered material among 47 third- and fourth-grade boys and girls and college students. (JMB)

Examined developmental changes in the use of distance-based and calendar-based approaches to estimate the recency of two events. Found that children's ability to discriminate temporal relationships between two events appears by four to five years of age. In contrast, use of calendar information and cognizance of annual patterns was found only in…

This study investigated (1) the order of acquisition of related temporal and spatial terms, (2) the application of temporal and spatial terms and (3) the relationship between the application of temporal and spatial terms and performance on cognitive measures of temporal and spatial ordering. Children 3 to 5 years of age were tested on four…

A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative…