Investigated occupational stereotypes of nursery school, kindergarten, third- and sixth-grade children, and the effects of their acquiring the concept of gender stability. Assessed (1) personal aspirations, and (2) ideas about jobs men and women do. (Author/GC)

To investigate the development of preschoolers' social-cognitive play behaviors, ten preschoolers (two, three and four years old) were observed in their classrooms on 15 occasions by a time-sampling schedule. Social-cognitive behavior coding (Parten and Smilansky) indicates that children's play became more social as they grew older. (Author/PN)

Compared age differences in search tasks for two groups of children (N=40) and an adult control group (N=20) who completed a similar visual search task, i.e., determining whether a predesignated target character occurred in a character string. The mean search latency decreased with age. Results showed a qualitative difference in processing letters…

Examined six- and eight-year-old children's use of contextual expectations to detect inconsistencies in story information and their ability to discriminate between information that resolved or was irrelevant to these inconsistencies. Results showed that six-year-olds frequently detected inconsistent events but that they failed to discriminate…

Compared performance of high- and low-education adults on traditional and meaningful space and reasoning measures. Separate analyses of variance for reasoning and space revealed main effects for education and age on both abilities. Results indicated highly educated older people performed more like their younger peers. (Author/JAC)

Studied the social judgments of children aged 10-15 in Trinidad and in Canada. Ten-year-olds assigned significantly more persons to the positive poles of dimensions. Mid-adolescents applied positive poles of dimensions to persons approximately 62 percent of the time. Discussed findings in terms of developmental implications. (Author/RC)

Examines cues which guide the discovery of simple cause-effect relations, beginning with the properties (suggested by Hume) of temporal precedence, covariation and contiguity; explores variables which can influence simple causal judgments; and discusses developmental evidence regarding inference principles associated with causal schemata.…

This inquiry had two aims: to assess children's ability to interpret maps in geography; to relate the assessed ability to maturity of thought as proposed by Peel, general intelligence, and age. It was found that performance on four tests depended more on intelligence than on maturity of thought or age. (Author/SJL)

A grouping task revealed a chronological progression: color and form determined the 4-year-old children's grouping about equally; form dominated in the 5-year-olds; and 9-year-olds grouped primarily by conceptual attributes. Performance on a memory task showed the developmental shift from color to form to concept, while cued recall showed…

Japanese elementary school children were administered a series of trials in a paired-associate learning paradigm. It was shown that younger children learn foreign words faster than older children. (JB)

Results confirmed that children differentially use knowledge of results and suggested that any description of motor skill acquisition must account for the complex interaction between developmental level and the difficulty of the task at hand. (Author/DB)

Factor analysis of correlations among the measures of recall clustering, free sorting, and recognition errors revealed significant convergent validity for consistent use of a semantic perceptual organization strategy in the three tasks. Ten-year-old, adult, and elderly adult subjects relied on a semantic strategy; four- and six-year-olds encoded…

Investigated (1) whether young children can extract a story's main idea, (2) how much they can recall from stories, (3) whether their recall is related to the main theme, (4) whether recall occurs in logical sequence, and (5) from which part of a story more ideas are remembered. (Author/DB)