Behavioral research demonstrates a critical transition in preschooler's mental-state understanding (i.e., theory of mind; ToM), revealed most starkly in performance on tasks about a character's false belief (e.g., about an object's location). Questions remain regarding the neural and cognitive processes differentiating children who pass versus…

Nearly 14% of people over age 71 have some form of dementia, with prevalence increasing to nearly 40% of those over age 90. As dimentia progresses, it impacts a person's independent functions and can increase the burden on caregivers. The use of assistive devices can help individuals with dementia live more independently. However, older…

Recent research studies and texts in composition demonstrate the growing belief that students' difficulties with the writing tasks assigned to them are inextricably linked with their difficulties in handling complex cognitive processes. Through appropriate writing activities, students can be provided with practice in the intellectual functions…

Reports the use of a memory load-interference paradigm and the easy-to-hard paradigm as converging operations to study capacity limitations in five- to six-year-old's reasoning. Concludes that transitive inference ability in children is capacity limited. (HOD)

Analyzes the performance of the Electronic Task (ET), to test for combinatorial reasoning, over a broad range of subject ages and abilities in order to evaluate it as a substitute for the original Chemical Task (CT). (GA)

Two studies on cognitive performance in mentally retarded children are reported. In the first study, the Bayley Scales of Infant Development were administered to 56 mentally retarded children, aged 2 to 6, to determine the possibility of discerning subsets of items that form a developmental pattern of interrelated subscales, using the SCAMMO scale…

The longitudinal interrelations among age, visual and auditory short-term memory, and the concrete operational tasks of class inclusion and combinatorial reasoning were investigated over four testing occasions in a sample of 134 students, initially ranging from 5 to 12 years in age. The Piagetian task battery involved placement of colored…

Interactions of children, parents, and staff of four multicultural, parent-run day-care centers were analyzed for methods of task analysis, communication symbols, and structures of pedagogical assistance. Results showed the presence of parents created rich cognitive interactions, suggesting the cognitive effects of a socially disadvantaged milieu…