Examines the development of work perceptions in adolescents (12 to 18 years old) from a relational-developmental perspective. From this viewpoint, adolescents' perceptions and understanding of work and related areas, such as employment and unemployment, varied across age and, to a limited extent, across levels of formal reasoning operations.…

Describes two experiments that examined children's understanding of the distinction between real and apparent emotion. Discusses the findings in relation to research concerning children's concept of mind, their grasp of the appearance-reality distinction; their ability to produce complex, embedded justifications; and their ideas about emotion.…

Investigated the relationship between developmental shifts in the organization of materials and developmental changes in deliberate strategy use. Subjects were second and fourth graders. (HOD)

Investigates young children's ability to adjust the content of their verbal responses according to what they know their listener knows. Younger and older three-year-old children were able to discern what another person knew and did not know and adjusted their responses accordingly. Younger three-year-olds tended to be underinformative. (SED)

Reports on two studies during which 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children were interviewed about three different types of regularities or rules: social conventions, physical laws, and logical necessities. Shows that older children made more distinctions between social and nonsocial items than did younger children. (HOD)

Describes four experiments conducted among adults and 3- to 7-year-olds to validate a task analysis that indicates that the equality, group enhancement, and superiority social decisions require a greater information processing load than the altruism, rivalry, and individualism social decisions. (HOD)

Describes two experiments that examined the effects of quantity and depth of processing on elementary school children's time perception. (HOD)

Using a microcomputer "dart" game, this study of 61 primary school students investigated how children of different ages used counting to make numerical estimates. Results showed developmental differences in accuracy of estimation, fluency in counting and sophistication of self-reported strategy use. (BS)

The relationship between understanding of friendship and asociality was examined in 91 girls and 104 boys, ages 9 to 17 years. Understanding friendship was significantly related to age and sex. Difficulty in understanding components of friendship appears to be one correlate of boys' delinquent tendencies. (Author/BS)

Reports three experiments which examined preschool, first-grade, and third-grade children's understanding of metaphorical language. Subjects acted out short stories which ended in metaphorical sentences by using toys. Predictability of the story endings and the complexity of the metaphorical sentences are found to affect metaphor comprehension.…

This study aimed to assess cognitive and behavior correlates of young children's interest in computers. Computer users tended to be older and exhibited significantly higher levels of cognitive maturity than nonusers. Other findings are discussed. Results suggest there are important cognitive underpinnings for computer involvement by preschoolers.…

Determined that males (N=70) demonstrate higher level of intellectual development than females (N=70), that males mature intellectually earlier than females, and that there appear to be factors other than age and sex that are related to development of formal operational reasoning. Implications of these and other results are discussed. (JN)

Analyzes the exploratory patterns of 112 children ages 4 to 12, using visual and auditory stimuli and toy preference and toy exploration tasks. Finds that a preference for complexity and for unknown toys increases with age and notes age differences in exploratory patterns and question-asking behavior. (Author/CB)

In an attempt to validate the findings of other researchers regarding the development of conceptual perspective taking, this study used Taylor's (1988) 2-tiered model to examine development of perspective taking among 40 3- to 5-year-olds. Participating were 22 males and 18 females from English-speaking backgrounds attending a preschool in…

This study considered differences in induction of biological properties between children and preadolescents based on differences in stimuli processing in these two groups. Two experiments tested predictions that young children, but not preadolescents, base their inductive inference on aggregating information from different sources rather than…