The effects of attention to symbolic presentation of contingent rewards, in the form of slide-presented images, on children's ability to wait for the delayed reward were investigated. Attention to the symbolic contingent rewards greatly increased the duration of the children's delay of gratification. (Author/KM)

Toddlers were asked to find a hidden toy based on one hidden in a scale model of the room, after varying periods of delay. Subjects experiencing a longer delay on the first trial performed more poorly than those experiencing the long delay later in the trials. Results indicate the difficulty for children of keeping a symbol-referent relation in…

This paper discusses links among the process of creativity, symbolization, and learning. The importance of symbolization in thinking, in school learning, in child development, and in the behavior of creative learners is stressed. (DB)

An empirically-based theory is proposed that relates media's most essential modes of presentation--their symbol systems--to modes of cognitive representation and to the acquisition of knowledge. This book draws upon scholarship in such areas as the study of symbol systems, cognition, cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and mass…

Piaget's concept of "internalization" is analyzed and related to Bruner's representational theories of cognitive development. Cognitive structures are shown to be real exclusively in an actual representation. (Author/SDH)

Analyzes concept formation in children based on the precepts of general semantics. (RB)

In the pair of experiments reported here the authors investigated the relationship between meaningfulness of problem statements and subjects' use of these statements in problem-solving tasks. Subjects (96 university students) were required to memorize meaningful formulae such as "volume = area x height" or corresponding symbolic formulae such as…

The generally bleak achievement scores of deaf children are contrasted with the near normal reports of both IQ and conceptual development. (Author)

This article reflects one session of a course in thinking and communicating for Pace University (New York) faculty. The purpose of the course was to heighten awareness that language can seriously misrepresent events which it describes, thus affecting students' ability to perceive, evaluate, and make day-to-day decisions. Beginning with a concrete…

This theoretical paper deals with a comparison of the structure and content of primary and secondary thought processes. While secondary processes (cognitive thinking) are effectively dealt with and taught in schools, there is little or no relating to the primary processes (affective thinking). This is due in part to teachers' own difficulties in…

Through the use of learned symbols, two chimpanzees accurately specified 11 foods by name to one another when the food item's identity was known by only one and requested specific food of one another by name. Requests resulted in cooperative and reciprocal symbolically mediated food exchange. (Author/MA)

"A new sort of concept attainment or decoding-encoding experimental paradigm based on the model is developed and an experiment on 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds is reported. (Author)