Considers assumptions underlying current cognitive science research on concepts: (1) novel information is first processed via similarity judgments and later by explanatory components; (2) children initially have a similarity-based component for learning concepts--the explanatory component develops on its foundation. Argues that these assumptions…

Reviews Kaufman Adolescent and Adult Intelligence Test (KAIT), a new assessment of cognitive function for technical qualities such as reliability, validity, and standardization characters. Concludes that KAIT represents advancements in cognitive assessment but cannot be regarded as superior to existing intelligence measures until data is available…

Questions the validity of current reductionist assumptions concerning learning differences and proposes a new science of life based on dynamic, transforming, hierarchically organized systems of energy. This view of cognition is related to Piaget's insights, which are extended to include a view of learning differences consistent with these…

Five adolescents with autism, 5 control participants, and 4 child controls received rewards for varying their sequences of responses while playing a computer game. In preceding and following phases, rewards were provided at approximately the same rate but were independent of variability. When reinforced, variability increased significantly in all…

Argues that the conceptual and methodological foundations of both developmental and difference approaches to mental retardation are deficient. Analysis of the relationship between cognitive functioning and cognitive level within chronological age cohorts allows for more sensitive tests and suggests the need for a paradigm shift based on regression…

Thirteen 4-year olds were asked to arrange dolls in order from largest to smallest. Longitudinal observations over six months revealed five approaches to ordering and four approaches to correction. The "method of extremum" was employed later in development; otherwise, the order in which approaches appeared was highly variable, with many…

Three studies examined lexical categorization in 2-year- olds. Findings indicated that even with minimal opportunities to familiarize themselves with novel artifacts, children generalized their names in accordance with the objects' functions, even when they had to discover the functions on their own or when all the test objects had some…

Three experiments assessed children's abilities to track behavioral, representational, and truth aspects of conventions. Three- and 4-year-olds recognized that conventional stipulations would change behavior, but not how stipulations might affect representations. Three- and 5-year-olds confused pretenses and conventions; 7-year-olds consistently…

Notes contemporary models of human development have expanded to address a wider set of issues underlying personal change. Discusses the social cognitive model of self-regulatory development. Emphasizes the crucial development of self-regulatory competence: the point at which the processes of development become fully and reciprocally interactive…

Five experiments using the visual habitation paradigm with 158 infants demonstrated that these 10-month olds did not use property/kind information to establish representations of 2 numerically distinct objects, a finding that provided support for the object-first hypothesis. (SLD)

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…

Examined 1,100 boys and 1,100 girls who matched the U.S. population using the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS) cognitive-processing theory, built on the neuropsychological work of A.R. Luria (1973). Results illustrate that the PASS theory offers a useful way to examine gender differences in cognitive performance. (BF)

Eight experiments examined abilities of 3- to 4-year-olds to reorient themselves and locate a hidden object in an open circular space furnished with landmark objects. Findings showed that children failed to use geometric configuration of objects to reorient themselves. Children successfully located the object in relation to a geometric…

In selecting the canonical colors of color-specific objects, children may use verbal mediation, a cognitive process whereby an object and its color are matched using verbal rather than pictorial representation [British Journal of Developmental Psychology 14 (1996) 339]. To investigate this process, 108 2- to 5-year-old children were asked to…

This paper builds on Hatano and Inagaki's pioneering work on the role of experience and cultural models in children's biological reasoning. We use a category-based induction task to consider how experience and cultural models shape rural and urban children's patterns of biological reasoning. We discuss the implications of these findings for…