How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment…

Although some evidence indicates that even very young children engage in rudimentary forms of strategic behavior, the underlying mechanisms remain largely unknown. This study tested the hypothesis that uncertainty monitoring underlies such behaviors. Three-, four-, and five-year-old children ("N" = 88) completed a perceptual…

Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of…

A developmental reversal in accuracy was obtained for third and sixth graders and adults who judged class membership of patterns presented in a same-different task. Reversal accuracy appeared to result from an increase with age in orientation-free judgments. This hypothesis was confirmed in the subsequent two experiments. (GO)

A model for sequencing tasks in the area of visual perception was developed. This paper reports an attempt to validate the structure of the model. The performance of 50 normal preschool children on a 47 item test was studied. The results obtained support the use of the model as a framework for developing visual perception tasks. (Author)

Assesses the degree of difficulty parents attribute to specific socialization tasks; explores the relation between parents' perceived difficulty and children's perceived and actual competence in these two domains; and determines whether the ease or difficulty of these child rearing tasks, as perceived by parents, varies as a function of the…

Twenty-seven kindergarten children were trained on two different double classification matrix tasks in an attempt to determine whether the tasks were hierarchically related. Prior behavior analyses of the tasks suggested that the two tasks shared many components, but that the more complex task had in addition components not included in the simpler…