Ritual has played an integral role in human development and socialization throughout history. This paper seeks to highlight that role so that the importance of perpetuating ritual becomes obvious and necessary. The purpose of this paper is to re-iterate the significance of ritual in human development, education, and social improvement; discuss the…

Although "hindsight bias" (the "I knew it all along" phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks…

Explores "Writer-Based" (expressive rather than communicative) prose in relation to the theory of egocentrism and suggests its implications for the teacher of writing. (DD)

Most students in most schools today study subject matter. They and their teachers conceive of the educational task as committing to memory large numbers of facts, formulas, and figures. A far more sophisticated perspective emphasizes teaching disciplines and disciplinary thinking. The goal of this approach is to instill in students the disposition…

This study investigated how 15 preadolescents and adolescents with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) performed on false belief tasks that included social inferencing of psychological states as well a logical inferencing of physical states. Unlike the control groups, the ASD group performed better on the social inferencing tasks and use of a prompt…

This study investigated the development of perceptual, cognitive, and affective perspective taking in 167 kindergarten through sixth grade children. Task intercorrelations were low, nonsignificant, and inconsistent, supporting the view that perspective taking is a multidimensional social-cognitive construct. (JMB)

A group of 45 undergraduates discussed a moral issue with a confederate who had the same opinion (no-controversy) or opposite opinion (controversy). Subjects in the controversy conditions were induced to have a high level of defensiveness by a disconfirmation of personal competence or a low level of defensiveness by a confirmation. Subjects in…

The relationship between children's perceptual, cognitive, and affective perspective-taking scores and their cognitive perspective-taking scores gathered one year later was assessed. Subjects were 56 kindergarten through third-grade children. (Author/JMB)

Findings of the comparison of spatial role taking, social role taking, and referential communication in 56 congenitally visually impaired and sighted children (seven to nine years old) revealed that visually impaired Ss need not differ from sighted Ss in cognitive social functioning if they have had significant verbal interaction with others.…

Learning disabled (n=28) and normal achieving (n=28) 8- and 9-year-old boys, approximately equated on the variables of IQ, age, and socioeconomic status, were administered three conservation tasks and J. Flavell's measure of cognitive role-taking. (Author/CL)

Compares the many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition--which proposes that children learn to take alternative perspectives along with the words they acquire--to the one-perspective account--which proposes that children are at first able to use only one term to talk about an object or event. Provides evidence from a variety of sources that…

Examined relation between early fantasy/pretense and knowledge about mental life in 3- and 4-year olds. Found that performance on theory of mind tasks was significantly intercorrelated when effects of verbal intelligence and age were statistically controlled. Individual differences in fantasy/pretense were related to theory of mind performance in…

The development of perspective taking was explored in kindergarten and second grade children using a referential communication task. (BRT)

A total of 180 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children participated in tasks employing an object array in which the views from the experimental positions were objectively of equal difficulty. (SB)