How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment…

In two experiments, we investigated whether 4- to 5-year-old children's ability to demonstrate their understanding of aspectuality was influenced by how the test question was phrased. In Experiment 1, 60 children chose whether to look or feel to gain information about a hidden object (identifiable by sight or touch). Test questions referred either…

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6- and 9-month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement…

The purpose of this sequence of a working paper intended for inclusion in a curriculum manual to be published in the future, is to provide the child with concrete experience, opportunities to represent things symbolically, and to learn the nature of symbols and how to read them. Examining objects, acting them out, and experimenting with them, the…

Discussed are results of studies of the cognitive development of 2- and 3-year-old children which suggest that the mind makes gains in the ability to think as gains in language development are made. "Thinking" in this context refers to the judgments children made as they selected objects and maneuvered them into one arrangement or…

Two experiments used object-manipulation tasks to examine whether one- to two-year-olds form superordinate-like categories by attending to object parts. Findings indicated that 14- and 18-month-olds behaved systematically toward categories with different, but not matching, parts. Without part differences, none formed superordinate categories.…

Findings indicated that (1) stable preference measures could be obtained, (2) high preference objects resulted in higher motivation to perform and hence higher levels on each scale, (3) performance of this population is not stable, and (4) ordinality was violated in nearly 20 percent of the administrations of the scales. (Author)

This study was designed to examine effects that access to manipulatives in science instruction have with respect to the development of spatial conceptual abilities and whether the effects were different for males and females. A secondary purpose of this investigation was to examine what relationship sex and access to manipulatives in conjunction…

This paper reports on an experiment undertaken to delineate more clearly the relationship between the naming process in children and certain aspects of the environment which may play a role in that process. The investigation concerned the effect of manipulation and of object novelty on naming. Sixteen children, ten girls and six boys, ranging in…

Five- to six-year-old children estimated the size of Euclidian objects using an addition rule of Height plus Width, rather than a multiplying rule. Within the framework of information integration theory, tested whether intensive handling of objects would facilitate shift from addition rule to multiplication rule. Found that following handling,…

This study explores a learning model which suggests that a concept is acquired first through manipulation of concrete objects followed by transformation of the concrete objects into semi-concrete representations, followed by internalization of the concept through abstract representations. Microcomputer simulations of manipulative activities were…