Two experiments examined whether young children's difficulty with behavioral predictions when appearance was misleading would extend to more general domains. Found that while both 3- and 5- year-olds understood that persons dressing up in costume would retain their real identities, 3-year-olds were unable to predict that the character's biological…

The relationship of Piagetian level of cognitive development to field-independence-dependence was examined in 20 school children aged 10-17, in northern Belize, Central America. (MP)

To investigate a cognitive-developmental explanation of attachments between grandparents and grandchildren, three groups of grandchildren (mean ages 4.6, 9.3 and 19.2 years) were studied. (Author/MP)

Used a combination of observational and experimental methods to assess young children's (aged 2 years, 11 months to 4 years, 9 months) comprehension of "if" and "because" expressions. Found significant increases in spontaneous "if" and "because" expressions between 3 and 4 years, and improvement on…

Investigated the hypothesis that the meaning young children attribute to the word "big" may depend differentially on the object of reference. Children three and five years of age who were shown pairs of buildings and pairs of cars used a height rule for both classes of objects when interpreting big. (NH)

A propositional logic game which is a subtest of the new British intelligence scale was analyzed to determine the extent to which skills proper to a single Piagetian period, formal operations, were hierarchically ordered. Item response patterns from 60 14-year-olds were categorized by means of ordering theory, a boolean algebraic measurement…

Thirteen 4-year olds were asked to arrange dolls in order from largest to smallest. Longitudinal observations over six months revealed five approaches to ordering and four approaches to correction. The "method of extremum" was employed later in development; otherwise, the order in which approaches appeared was highly variable, with many…

Investigated young children's ability to talk about representational aspects of pretense. Found that 5-year-olds, but very few 4-year-olds, can explain why certain actions should not be called pretending; young children discriminate between pictures of thinking and pretending based on a depiction of action; and preschoolers are less able than…

This study examined the differential effects on a learning task of two different types of comprehension measures. (SB)

Three degrees of cognitive processing were tapped by four problem types when 60 children between four and eight years were administered a set of geometry tasks differing in complexity. Analysis revealed that the tasks differed in difficulty, task success was related to age, and a hierarchical sequence existed among the skills. (SKC)

Asserts that this text by Matthews is a remedy to the scant attention paid to philosophical questioning by children. Describes the book's attempt to set children's philosophical questions against a re-examination of children's art and literature, legal issues regarding children's autonomy, and psychological models of the child's cognitive and…

A series of 27 individual three-dimensional, visual-motor tutoring sessions were given to 8 trainable mentally retarded public school children. (BRT)

This study examined the relationship between cognitive style and information processing in preschoolers, and described developmental changes in their performance on a central-incidental learning task. Sixty preschoolers, in two age groups (mean ages of 4-1 and 4-11), were administered tests of reflection-impulsivity, field dependence-independence,…

Tests children for the effects of prior knowledge on the amount of learning that occurs after a training period focusing on either number skills or logical operations. No relationship existed between the amount children learned and their pretraining knowledge or the amount learned and their developmental level. (Author/BB)

Examined relationships among theory of mind construct of intention and false belief, problem-solving ability, metacognitive regulation, and strategy use in 39 preschoolers. Found significant correlations between strategy use and theory of mind, and metacognitive regulation and theory of mind. A moderate, but nonsignificant, correlation was found…