Four-year olds, 6-year olds, and adults were given a computer-game mental rotation task, but with no instructions on mental rotation or other mental activity. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year olds were comparable to adults in spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year olds who referred to…

We investigated the cognitive content of worry in 8- to 13-year-old clinic-referred anxious (n = 38) and nonreferred (n = 51) children. The children were interviewed individually. They thought-listed their latest worry episodes, rated the uncontrollability of the episodes, and reported on the strategies they used to terminate worry. Content…

If after teaching a label for 1 object, a speaker does not name a nearby object, 3-year-olds tend to reject the label for the nearby object (W.E. Merriman, J.M. Marazita, L.H. Jarvis, J.A. Evey-Burkey, and M. Biggins, 1995a). In Studies 1 (5-year-olds) and 3 (3-year-olds), this effect depended on object similarity. In Study 2, when a speaker used…

Recent anatomical and electrophysiological evidence suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is relatively late to mature. This brain region appears to be critical for monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting ongoing behaviors. This monitoring elicits characteristic ERP components including the error-related negativity (ERN), error…

In two experiments on very young children's response to the orientation of pictures and objects, 18-, 24- and 30-month-old children showed no preference for upright pictures over inverted ones. More importantly, we found that children in all three age groups were equally accurate and equally fast at identifying depicted objects regardless of…

Kuhn and Pease (p. 279, this issue) provide evidence for a change in learning as a result of increasing executive control during later childhood. Although the ability to inhibit information that biases answers in a reasoning task may account for their findings, the opportunity to gain specific experiences and engage different strategies in…

This study reports on our steps toward achieving a conceptually coherent and empirically validated learning progression for carbon cycling in socio-ecological systems. It describes an iterative process of designing and analyzing assessment and interview data from students in upper elementary through high school. The product of our development…

Although it is acknowledged that adults integrate features into a representation of the whole face, there is still some disagreement about the onset and developmental course of holistic face processing. We tested adults and children from 4 to 6 years of age with the same paradigm measuring holistic face processing through an adaptation of the…

This study investigated age differences in the way in which attentional resources are allocated to expository text and whether these differences are moderated by content preexposure. The organization of the preexposure materials was manipulated to test the hypothesis that a change in organization across two presentations would evoke more…

Post-formal operational thought is characterized by both relativism and dialecticism. To examine age differences across adulthood in relativistic and dialectical thought, and to determine whether formal operations are necessary but not sufficient for these forms of thought, 20 young (mean age, 19.6), 20 middle aged (mean age, 46.2), and 20 older…

Research findings suggest the existence of three types of primitive regulation in the behavior of 1 1/2- to 2 1/2-year old children in memory tasks. When children are presented with a game of hide-and-seek to be played with a small stuffed animal, regulatory behavior appears to be related to children's use of stimulus information, precursors of…

Monitored the processing activity in the storage and retrieval stages of the information processing sequence. Storage was evaluated by analyses of overt rehearsal; correct responding and order of recall provided data relevant to the retrieval phase. Subjects were third, fifth and seventh graders. (SDH)

Older adults are significantly slower than young adults in the naming response in the Stroop Color Word Interference Test. Hypotheses attempting to explain this age-related difference in a perceptual-cognitive task have included orthogenic principle, response-competition, and cautiousness. This study examines whether there are any significant…

Age-related deficits may exist in episodic memory (knowledge of the context in which an item appeared previously) and semantic memory (knowledge of an item's meaning independent of the context). In order to examine adult age differences in semantic priming effects and subsequent episodic retention for visually presented words, 24 young (18-22…

Research has suggested that memory performance may be related to the extent of stimulus processing during acquisition. To examine processing efficiency and processing deficiency differences between younger and older adults, four studies were conducted. In the first study, young and old adults rated word lists, manipulated for generation specific…