PIAGET'S THEORETICAL FORMULATION OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSERVATION OF CONTINUOUS QUANTITY WAS EXAMINED. CONTROL SUBJECTS IN EACH OF TWO AGE GROUPS (5 AND 6 YEARS) WERE GIVEN A COMPLEX TASK SITUATION THAT IS TYPICAL OF PIAGET'S WORK. THESE SUBJECTS WERE ALSO GIVEN ANOTHER TASK, A MEASURE OF CONSERVATION OF QUANTITY THAT IS INDEPENDENT OF PIAGET'S…

Two studies: (1) assessed the infant's ability to perceive differences between two-dimensional and three-dimensional stimuli; and (2) tested the infants' ability to transfer responses across dimensions. (Author/SB)

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.…

Describes two experiments that assessed young children's understanding of the characteristic uncertainty in the physical nature of random phenomena as well as the unpredictability of outcomes. (HOD)

Investigated developmental trends in part-whole perception. The effects of the whole on the perception of small parts was greater at the kindergarten level than at the 4th grade; and there was a change in the perception of the parts so that they came to look like the whole in shape. (DP)

To demonstrate a relationship between rate of habituation and complexity levels, 11-week-old infants (N=51) were each given a rate-of-habituation and complexity-level test. Rapid habituators looked longer at complex patterns. Irregular habituators responded randomly to tests or resembled slow habituators in terms of complexity preferred. (ST)

Portions of this paper were read at the Eastern Psychological Association meeting, April 1968, Washington, D.C. (DR)

Nonoperational first graders were taught Piaget's horizontality concept. In comparison to control subjects, training group subjects significantly increased correct responses, maintained their gains, and transferred their training from a straight-sided jar to a round-sided jar. (Author/DB)

Compared face recognition ability in young children with autism to that of children with typical development and developmental delay. Took electroencephalographic recordings of brain activity while children viewed pictures of their mothers and unfamiliar females, and familiar and unfamiliar toys. Found that autistic children showed no differences…

Two experiments investigated whether 5-month olds would look longer at rotating "drawbridge" appearing to violate physical laws because they knew it was causally impossible. Findings indicated that infants' longer gaze at 180-degree rotations was due to simple perceptual preference for more motion, challenging Baillargeon's (1987) claim…

Three studies investigated toddlers' judgments and communications about how desires, perceptions, and emotions connect in people's lives and minds. Findings indicated that in appropriate circumstances, young children realized that a person's perception of desirable or undesirable objects leads to related emotional experiences. Children's…

Four experiments examined 8-month-olds' ability to reason about collections of objects. Findings suggested that infants' expectations about object behavior do not automatically apply to any and all portions of matter within the visual field. The behavior of an entity and infants' prior experience played roles in determining whether infants will…

Familiarized 6- and 8-month-olds with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. Found that only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. Results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the…

Tested in six experiments young infants' sensitivity to vowel and gender information in faces and voices. Found that 4.5-month-olds showed no evidence of matching face and voice based on gender, but were able to ignore irrelevant gender information and match based on the vowel. Robust evidence of ability to match based on gender was not evident…

Early childhood neglect can limit a child's normal cognitive development and result in behavior problems in the classroom. When normal attachment is disrupted, learning difficulties can result in problems with time awareness. It has also been shown that an awareness of time is a key concept for the formation of organizational and math skills. This…