Forty children of different ages responded individually to cartoon drawing in one of two orders of presentation in order to investigate children's understanding of recursive thinking. Five boys and five girls in each of the age ranges five to six, six to seven, seven to eight, and eight to nine served as subjects. (MP)

Investigates the extent to which educable mentally retarded (EMR) children make functional use of a hierarchical class inclusion system in a memory retrieval task that does not have experimenter-imposed input organization. (MP)

This study sought to determine if age-related increases in memory for prose are, in part, due to deliberate mnemonic strategies and if older children use the high order relations in prose more efficiently than younger children. (HOD)

Two experiments investigated the process by which children encode briefly presented spatial positions. First, third, and fifth graders were asked to judge whether a test dot occupied the same position on a card as any one of a number of dots which had been presented tachistoscopically. (JMB)

Kindergartners, second, and fifth graders made repeated trips through a large- or small-scale model town, and then constructed from memory the layout of buildings in either large- or small-scale space. (JMB)

Semantic and phonological encoding in 48 young (18-24 years) and 48 elderly (60-77 years) adults was investigated using a short-term memory release from proactive interference paradigm. (Author/SB)

In this experiment, 446 children, ranging in age from 5-10 years, were required to draw one object behind another in a situation in which adults invariably produce the further object partially occluded to the nearer. (MS)

The study focused on the question of whether the use of general persuasive strategies reflecting progressively higher levels of perspective-taking ability increases with age. (SB)

Reviews research on children's and adults' beliefs about fantasy and their tendency to engage in "magical thinking." Suggests that children are not fundamentally different from adults in their ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Both entertain fantastical beliefs and engage in magical thinking. Offers suggestions regarding age…

This study contrasted development of processing speed in 122 children between 7.5 and 11.8 years with learning disabilities and that of 206 nondisabled controls. No differences were found in relation to age in processing speed development in the two groups. Findings suggest that underlying etiologies for the normal developmental change in…

Investigated developmental trends associated with the Deese/Roediger-McDermott false-memory effect, the role of distinctive information, and subjective experience of true/false memories. Found that 5-year-olds recalled more false memories than adults but no age differences in recognition of critical lures. Distinctive information reduced false…

Examined gaze aversion in 5- and 8-year-olds when answering verbal reasoning and arithmetic questions of varying difficulty. Found that older children increase gaze aversion from the face of the adult questioner in response to both verbal and arithmetic difficult questions. Young children responded less consistently to cognitive difficulty.…

Findings indicated that: (1) 10- and 13-year-olds had difficulty accepting contrary-to-fact premises as a basis for reasoning; (2) 15- and 18-year-olds found reasoning correctly more difficult with contrary-to-fact premises; and (3) among 5- and 7-year-olds, a fantasy context decreased the extent to which empirical knowledge interfered with…

Assessed knowledge of retrieval processes (feeling-of-knowing judgments and retrieval monitoring) of subjects (N=20) aged 25-35 and subjects (N=20) aged 70-85 using recent news event questions. Found age group differences in accuracy of retrieval monitoring, free recall and recall aided by phonological cues but not in participants' knowledge of…

Explores the role of premature cognitive closure in the development of inferential reasoning among 62 children aged 7, 9, and 12 years through two studies. Results indicate that despite a strong tendency to close on single alternatives, most children correctly assigned nonzero probabilities to each of the possible alternatives. (RJC)