The development of the ability to use taxonomic, phonemic and sense impression categories as dimensions of encoding was investigated using third and fifth graders and college students. (ED)

Reports results of an exploratory study in which a total of 80 children (in kindergarten, first, third and fifth grades) were interviewed in order to sample their knowledge of how certain classes of variables act and interact with one another to affect the quality of an individual's performance on a retrieval problem. (ED)

To investigate the development of children's knowledge of the intension and extension of four natural concepts (cup, scissors, money, and musical instrument), three questions were explored in an experiment involving one-hundred-and-twenty 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (40 children for each age group). Extension was measured in a verbal labeling…

Young children were studied in tasks that required them to select one object as "different" from another. Children systematically selected maximally similar objects until about 3 years of age, and thereafter performed correctly. Additional data derived from the children's verbal justifications and refusals to select suggested a 4-stage model in…

Two studies examined how nonconservers use the dimensions relevant to quantity in the conservation of substance task. Most nonconservers are very selective in their use of the information provided by these dimensions. Most preschool and kindergarten nonconservers used length to define amount, while ignoring width. This was true regardless of how…

The theory of a number of philosophers and psychologists, including Freud, is that humor is a biphasic sequence involving first the discovery of incongruity and then the resolution of the incongruity. Without the mechanism of resolution, we cannot distinguish humor from nonsense. The punch line of a joke is seemingly incongruous with the preceding…

A group of 60 children from grades K, 1, 3, 4, and 8 were assessed via a battery of Piagetian tasks to determine their stages of cognitive development. They were then asked to interpret a number of metaphors ranging in frequency of occurrence in adult speech from common to rare. (Author/JMB)

Development of cognitive processes and visual perception in 128 Down Syndrome (DS) children (ages 5 to 18) was compared to that of 162 nonhandicapped children (ages 3 to 8). Linear, rather than stepwise, relationships between performance and chronological age in the DS subjects and similar to normal visual perceptual development were found.…

Five experiments investigated whether the cued recall of children and adults differed for classified events featuring different category and relation types. Recall for events differed strongly for children and adults. Differences were attributed to properties of the internal structure of event representation in memory. (SKC)

The ability of 96 children (five, eight, and 12 years old) to nominate strategic social action that would alter a peer's ongoing emotional state was examined. Nominated strategies were appropriate to the emotional state to be altered; a shift with age from material intervention strategies to strategies involving verbal intervention or helping was…

Reviewed research with the Twenty Questions Task aimed at investigating problem solving across the life span. Research indicates use of an efficient problem-solving strategy increases during childhood and then decreases again during the later adult years. Elderly adults' performance was facilitated when the necessity of using an efficient strategy…

Fifth graders, ninth graders, college students, and persons over age sixty-five were given pencil-and-paper tasks in spatial development. Discusses results in terms of ecological validity, experience, and number of competing cues to be processed simultaneously. Used Piaget's formulation on adult cognitive development to explain elderly's…

Reversal and nonreversal shifts in 19 2- to 14-year-old autistic children were studied. Results indicated that the older autistic children did better on reversal shifts than did younger children, who performed better on nonreversal shifts. Findings were consistent with those for normal children. (Author)

Reviews literature on hemispheric specialization. Argues that foundations of hemispheric specialization are present very early in life and that children's greater ability to recover functions following brain injury suggests developmental changes in brain organization. (CMG)