Five-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and adults were compared in a successive tachistoscopic recognition task in which size of the first array and the interval between the first array and the second single recognition-test stimulus were varied. (Author/SB)

To study age-related improvements in information processing, a release from proactive interference (PI) procedure was used with 144 children in conjunction with a running memory task. For class of item and acoustic similarity, evidence was found for PI release with age, but there was no evidence of a relationship between short-term memory (STM)…

Examined intraindividual variability in divergent and convergent thinking and self-reported cognitive variation, and the relationship of adult age to actual variability in cognitive performance across tasks in young adults (N=100) and older adults (N=100). Variability was a consistent individual difference characteristic for divergent and…

Eight-year-olds were able to make inferential judgments based on transitive size relations, while 6-year-olds were not. In addition, more older than younger subjects evidenced serial ordering, presumably a prerequisite for transitive inference. (MH)

Accuracy in reporting horizontally arranged letter sequences was measured for second-grade children and for adults using a tachistoscopic single report procedure. Results indicated age differences in both the amount of information encoded out of visual sensory store and in the magnitude of left/right visual field differences. (Author/MP)

Two studies examined age-related declines in the functioning of working memory. Negative correlations between age and measures of working memory were found. These relations were attenuated by measures of storage capacity, processing efficiency, coordination effectiveness, and simple comparison speed. The greatest attenuation occurred with simple…

Explores the nature and consequences of developmental change in speed of information processing. Summarizes evidence indicating that age differences in processing speed reflect a global mechanism that limits processing speed on most tasks. Describes evidence that suggests a role for processing speed on the development of intelligence. (Author/MKA)

Designed a novel activity, Story Construction from a Picture Book, to assess young children's abilities to construct meaning independent of decoding skills. Subjects were five- and six-year olds, assessed again two years later. Found children responded well to the assessment, and scores on three of four variables increased with age, though not…

Much research has indicated that aging is accompanied by decrements in memory performance across a wide variety of tasks and situations. A dominant perspective is that these age differences reflect normative changes in the integrity and efficiency of the information-processing system. Contextual perspectives of development, however, argue for…

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2,…

The present study investigated event-based prospective memory in five age groups of preschoolers (i.e., 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds). Applying a laboratory-controlled prospective memory procedure, the data showed that event-based prospective memory performance improves across the preschool years, at least between 3 and 6 years of age. However,…

To examine the ontogeny of emotional face processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adults and 7-month-old infants while viewing pictures of fearful, happy, and neutral faces. Face-sensitive ERPs at occipital-temporal scalp regions differentiated between fearful and neutral/happy faces in both adults (N170 was larger for fear)…

Extending the study of autobiographical narratives to entire life narratives, we tested the emergence of globally coherent life narratives in adolescence, as hypothesized by McAdams (1985). Participants were 102 children and young adults (ages 8, 12, 16, and 20 years) who narrated their lives twice. Between narrations, half of each age group…

This study explored the contribution of the phonological and executive working memory (WM) systems to 205 (102 girls, 103 boys, 6 to 9 years old) elementary school children's fluid and crystallized intelligence. The results show that (a) a 3-factor structure (phonological short-term memory [STM], visual-spatial WM, and verbal WM) was comparable…