Investigated relationships and sequence of acquisition among seven gender concepts and extent to which cognitive maturity is related to them. Study of 60 preschool children found that gender concepts improve with age, are similar in both sexes, and are related to one another and to some aspects of cognitive maturity. (Author/ML)

Examines the quality of conversation produced by small groups of subjects in fifth, ninth, and twelfth grades and the last year of college. Results supported Piaget's sequence of conversational development. However, topical coherence apparently is not fostered by focused turns but emerges as a generalization of the normative constraints applying…

Assesses age differences in the reliability of the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for children commissioned by the National Institute for Mental Health. The interview, covering a broad range of clinically relevant symptoms and behaviors, was administered to 242 children and their parents. Parent and child were interviewed separately and were…

The false recognition procedure was used to determine the relative dominance of visual and verbal memory organization at two grade levels. The results indicated that visual encoding was predominant for first graders, but that both visual and verbal encoding occurred with fourth graders. (MS)

Illustrates the use of a Piagetian-influenced research strategy in overcoming existing methodological problems in human experience research and presents illustrative data on human early experience research which has so far yielded inconsistent data. (GO)

Theory of mind research focuses on children's understanding of other people's minds, their desires, intentions, and beliefs. Currently, there is much debate as to what is the substrate for children's theory of mind development; socio-cognitive skills, linguistic development, a simulation of one's own mental states, and the maturation of innate…

Study examined word associations from the perspective of cognitive level and thought processes. (Authors/MB)

Biological theories of adaptation are used to generate a model of human cognitive development in which physiological and cognitive change in aged persons can be understood as an adaptive stage of development. Related literature is reviewed that focuses on the elderly as information transmitters and on the psychology of "telling."…

Reviews evolutionary, psychoanalytic, social learning, and cognitive developmental approaches to the development of altruism and proposes a framework that integrates the approaches. The four approaches are compared in terms of three general issues: the origin of altruism, the conception of altruism as a state or a trait, and individual differences…

Four groups of children (N=80; C.A. 6.6. to 12.5; M.A. 7.9 to 14.7) were tested for ability to reproduce five-element two- and three-dimensional patterns. Significant interaction and main effects were found. Three-dimensional pattern performance increased with age; all ages performed well on two-dimensional patterns. (Author/DB)

Third- and seventh-grade and college students were tested to assess developmental differences in improvement following contradiction training and to investigate whether improved performance transfers to other conditional reasoning tasks. Results showed age differences: college students improved and transferred performance, seventh graders…

Army alpha longitudinal data on the same 96 males tested in 1919, 1950, and 1960 were analyzed in addition to data on 123 undergraduates tested in 1972-4. Young adults in 1919 and 1970 were similar. Results suggest that traditional factor analysis taxonomies for young adults misrepresent elderly persons. (Author/CP)

Reports results of two experiments to test recognition decisions of increasing difficulty among preschool children. Increasing levels of difficulty were perceptual identity, common object-class, and either taxonomic category or complementary pair formation. (Author/DB)

Investigates differences between adolescents and older adults in their explanations of linguistic metaphors. Adults displayed a synthesizing, integrative perspective, while adolescents displayed an analytic perspective in their explanation of metaphors. (Author/SS)

The Wickens release from proactive interference (RIP) short-term memory technique was used to study encoding with functional categories by 7-, 10-, and 19-year-old male and female subjects. (CM)