The expansion of digital technologies and the rapid changes they undergo through time face users with new cognitive, social, and ergonomic challenges that they need to master in order to perform effectively. In recent years, following empirical reports on performance differences between different age-groups, there is a debate in the research…

Infants know that humans are exempt from some of the principles that govern the motion of inanimate objects: for instance, humans can be caused to move without being struck. In the current study, we report that infants nevertheless do apply some of the same principles to both humans and objects, where appropriate. Five-month-old infants expect…

This paper examines the category-theoretic formulation of cognitive development introduced by Piaget in the late 1960's and elaborated during the 1970's. The new theory is interpreted as the focal point of Piaget's investigations into topics such as function, correspondences, and commutability. Hypotheses arising from Piaget's new model were…

Adolescents with mental retardation viewed a story enacted with props and were asked questions about the knowledge and beliefs of the characters. Subjects performed worse than did nondisabled children matched for mental age. Subjects did better on questions requiring first-order reasoning than on those involving second-order reasoning. (Author/JDD)

Studied children's transitive inference where representation of premises provided contradictory information depending on position of two elements in a A, B, C series. Eight-year olds did significantly better on the more complex problems than did six-year olds, suggesting the presence of a developmental sequence of algorithms that enable children…

Delineates the current consensus regarding the nature and the development of intellectual ability. Examines when one would expect general abilities to moderate the relationship among domain-specific and other processes. Reviews recent studies in which general abilities were used as independent variables or covariates. Suggests that generally,…

A constructivist analysis of the concepts of communication and environment may go against the traditional ideas of realists. Both concepts are treated as subjective constructs of a cognizing agent. It is held that the basis of the constructivist theory of knowing as the idea that knowledge is a mapping of ways of acting and thinking and the result…

This research investigates the development of analogy, in particular, the study of the development of systematicity in analogy. Systematicity refers to the mapping of systems of mutually constraining relations, such as causal chains or chains of implication. A preference for systematic mappings is a central aspect of analogical processing in…

Describes two studies investigating the development of recursive thinking in 60 Dutch children five, seven, and nine years of age. The first study replicated earlier research employing a verbal production procedure. The second study used verbal comprehension procedures and concluded that development appears two years earlier than indicated by the…

The pursuit of a science of mind has been marked by persistent conceptual tension. At one pole, exemplified by Piaget, the mind is characterized in terms of overarching principles. At the other end of the continuum, theory is more concerned with modeling particulars, as represented by the information processing model. This paper explores the…

First and fifth graders participated in this assessment of ways in which differential experience with objects in a spatial array might establish relative landmarks within the array. Results suggest that different levels of experience can establish elements as relative landmarks in spatial memory. (Author/RWB)

Describes three studies that examined how young children distinguish between the real, physical world and the mental world; between objects and thoughts; and between doing something and imagining it. (HOD)

This study reports on an analysis of the relation between kindergarten children's developing theory of mind and their understanding of characters' actions and consciousness in story narrative, based on Bruner's (1986) notion of the dual landscapes of action and consciousness. Wordless picture books were used to model these two aspects of…

Described is an investigation that determined whether young children have schemas for environmental information. The results are discussed with reference to the importance of memory schemas for learning about the environment. (KR)

Five- to six-year-old children estimated the size of Euclidian objects using an addition rule of Height plus Width, rather than a multiplying rule. Within the framework of information integration theory, tested whether intensive handling of objects would facilitate shift from addition rule to multiplication rule. Found that following handling,…