The purpose of this research was to examine 18- to 30-month-old children's use of scripts for representing common events. A script is defined as a model that specifies the roles and props appropriate to an event and identifies a sequence of acts for achieving the goal defined by the event. Two aspects of script knowledge were investigated: (1) the…

This study provides evidence of sex-typed behavior in the spontaneous play of infants between 9 1/2 and 15 1/2 months. Eight boys and eight girls at 9 1/2, 11 1/2, 13 1/2, and 15 1/2 months were observed during 15 minutes of free play with a variety of realistic toys equally divided into male, female, and neutral categories. Stereotypical,…

Two experiments are reported that reveal the sources of the developmental difference reported by Crane and Ross that second graders learned more than sixth graders about attributes made relevant after solution of a discrimination task. Experiments use technique whereby children verbalize their hypotheses during solution of a discrimination…

Children's understanding of dreams as mental states was examined as an instance of their development of a "theory of mind." Thirty-five children between three and seven years of age were interviewed to determine how well they understood the reality, location, privacy, origin, and controllability of their own dreams, versus that of a…

The purpose of this study was to determine age-related differences in preschoolers' emerging awareness of the human mind's functions. The study predicted that preschoolers are gradually becoming aware of their own mind functions and those of others. Forty children (mean age in months = 54.1; mean age in years = 4.51) were observed and questioned…

The locative categories--"in,""above,""below," and "beside"--were investigated to determine whether their exemplars were organized according to the prototype distinction. (RH)

Eleven response types were identified and shown to form both a developmental and a hierarchical sequence of comparison and integration operations. An age-related progression in response abstractness was also found and a significant interrelation of response abstractness with response type was demonstrated. (RH)

Examined the role played by experience with multidimensional stimuli in the child's ability to separate variables. (Author/DB)

When 48 first-, fourth-, and seventh-grade boys (classified as high, moderate, or low on an expectancy of success measure) were given a repetition choice task, a developmental trend in number of children choosing the interrupted task was found. When the task's difficulty level was matched to the child's grade, the trend was not found. (Author/JH)

Attempted to determine (1) whether developmental differences existed in children's comprehension of simple necessity and simple sufficiency relationships, and (2) the source of developmental differences in children's causal reasoning. (SB)

Used stories involving self-deception, lying, and misleading appearances to examine 4- to 9-year olds' understanding of the relations between false belief, evidence, and epistemic responsibility. Found that younger children who understood false belief understood simpler types of deception but that understanding self-deceivers' epistemic…

Two experiments examined 6- to 11-year-olds' cognition about self- presentational behavior. Findings indicated that youngest children had difficulty in identifying self-presentational motives by story characters. Even with children who had mental-state reasoning skills required for understanding others' beliefs about the self, there remained…