Twenty-four- and 30-month-old children were presented with a picture that showed the location of a hidden toy and were then asked to find the toy. The 30-month olds, but not the 24-month-olds, were successful in retrieving the toy. Concludes that 24-month olds did not interpret the pictures as representations of reality. (BC)

Three studies examined young children's understanding that, if one "remembers" or "forgets," one must have known something previously. The majority of four-year olds, but not three-year olds, understood that, when two characters currently knew something, the one with prior knowledge remembered and that, when neither character…

Preschoolers made judgments about solutions in which substances were dissolved. Preschoolers (1) distinguished visual appearance from underlying reality; (2) recognized the conservation of taste, smell, and dangerous properties; and (3) by age five recognized that matter can be decomposed into pieces too tiny to be seen by the naked eye. (BC)

Tested adults and children (age 6 to 16 years) on 4 speeded tasks that included 19 experimental conditions. The 6- to 16-year olds' response times decreased with age as a function of adults' response times. (MM)

Adults, 9-year olds, and 5-year olds were shown horizontal and vertical lines of various sizes, presented on same wall or different walls, and asked to estimate corresponding area. Responses indicated that when width and height were separated, children gave same weight to both dimensions while adults gave greater weight to larger dimensions; when…

Pursues three goals: (1) to study developmental trends of cognitive functions across different age groups of Finnish students; (2) to identify distinct cognitive subgroups and profiles among students; and (3) to compare cognitive styles of normal and language-impaired (dysphasic) students. Reports and interprets findings in terms of the PASS…

Three experiments examined 3- to 6-year olds' ability to use a speaker's utterance based on false belief to identify which of several referents was intended. Found that many 4- to 5-year olds performed correctly only when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief. When the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance, many 3- to 6-year olds…

Sixty-three siblings (and their parents) of individuals with autism or related disorders were interviewed to determine their cognitive sophistication about autism. Although children's reasoning became more mature with age, it tended to develop at a delayed rate compared to norms for illness concepts. Parents tended to overestimate their child's…

Investigated children's representational ability as a cognitive factor underlying the suggestibility of their eyewitness memory. Found that the eyewitness memory of children lacking multirepresentational abilities or sufficient general memory abilities (most 3- and 4-year-olds) was less accurate than eyewitness memory of those with…

Examined 2-, 2.5-, and 3-year-olds' reasoning while searching for a ball that had been rolled behind an occluder. Found only 3-year-olds were able to reliably select the correct door; all children could retrieve a toy hidden in the same apparatus if it was hidden from the front by opening a door; and younger children used a variety of strategies.…

Investigated preschoolers' responses to ambiguous descriptions of location. Ambiguous ("in one of the bags") descriptions caused longer search latencies in four- and five-year olds than nonambiguous descriptions ("in the bag by the chair"). The reverse was true for three-year olds. Results suggest that changes in information…

Four-year olds, 6-year olds, and adults were given a computer-game mental rotation task, but with no instructions on mental rotation or other mental activity. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year olds were comparable to adults in spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year olds who referred to…

Used short narratives to study false memory in 6-, 8-, and 11-year olds and adults. The persistence effect and false-memory creation effect were greatest for statements that would be regarded as factually incorrect reports of events in sworn testimony; like suggestive questioning, interviews that involve nonsuggestive recognition questions may…

Two studies examined age differences in conditional reasoning. Results indicated that 8-year-olds performed better when antecedents were weakly associated with consequents than on strongly associated antecedent/consequents, with no difference among 11-year-olds. Eight-year-olds did better on ad hoc premises than on causal premises, with no…

Two experiments tested a model of young children's induction that specified contributions of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to children's induction. Results support model predictions and point to a developmental shift, from treating linguistic labels as an attribute contributing to similarity to treating them as markers of a common…