The way cognitive, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can aid in further understanding of memory span change in children is discussed. ERPs are time-dependent changes in electrical activity of the brain (as recorded by scalp electrodes) following the presentation of a physical stimulus through auditory, visual, or somatosensory modalities. The…

This study questioned whether children's relative inability to use the two cerebral hemispheres independently contributes to their difficulty with the simultaneous execution of conflicting tasks. Two naming tasks involving the identification of upright and inverted letters were employed; conditions differed according to how the letter pairs were…

Traditionally, assessment of the cognitive competencies of older adults has focused on abstract laboratory tests, which have often seemed quite unlike the demands of tasks encountered in everyday activities. Consequently, external validity of these laboratory tasks has been questioned, and their utility for assessing real-world competence has been…

Several writers have suggested that changes in temporal perspective during adolescence are largely a consequence of the cognitive acquisitions held to characterize the period (i.e., emergence of formal operations reasoning). To replicate earlier research, which found little association between adolescents' formal operations reasoning and future…

Subjects (n=24), 12 of whom were in the age range of 18-30 years and 12 of whom were between 55-65 years, performed two semantic memory tasks. Results suggested that subjects in the older group may have retrieved information faster than the young subjects, but that they required longer to decide upon a response. (Author)

This study had two major purposes: to examine the effects of dimensional salience upon the learning of conjunction and disjunction rules, and to investigate an alternative to the prevailing cognitive-change accounts of developmental differences in multidimensional problem solving. The relative salience of each of four stimulus dimensions (form,…

The purpose of this followup electromyographical study was to gain further insight on previous research findings indicating that subvocal speech is significantly correlated with recall for preschool boys but not for girls. Twenty-two preschool children (11 boys, 11 girls; 50-67 months old) participated in 12 trials using high-labial and low-labial…

A study was conducted to examine longitudinal and cross-sectional age effects on accuracy of decoding nonverbal cues. A videotaped nonverbal discrepancy test was administered to 78 children aged nine to fifteen years. The test measured (1) decoding accuracy--the extent to which subjects were able to identify affects (positivity and dominance) from…

The effects of organizational variables on recall of prose were examined in 48 college-educated adults in three age groups (20 to 33 years, 41 to 55 years, and 58 to 79 years). It was hypothesized that if older adults suffered deficits in organizational processes, they would show lower quantities of prose recall, difficulties in following the…

In a 1964 investigation of the effects of age and memory on problem solving, using subjects from age three to age nineteen, it was found that the youngest and oldest subjects performed a three-choice probabilistic task significantly different from the "middle-age" children (7 to 9 years old). The three-choice task was an apparatus with a…

This report describes a series of studies concerned with preschool children's art. Preliminary work was based on observation of sessions in which one child would draw a picture in the presence of an adult. Major findings were that: (1) the children did not have preconceived notions of what they would draw; (2) they did not try to capture a moment…

This series of studies was concerned with developmental changes in memory organization. Denney & Ziobrowski's (1972) "complementary-similarity" shift with age in the bases of encoding for memory was investigated with two new paradigms which assessed memory performance for the same stimulus materials within the same subjects. No evidence was found…

Age effects on increasing number of targets in a letter-canceling task were examined. Age differences increased with practice but reached significance only in Session 9. The oldest group made the most omission errors. All age groups improved with practice. (Author)

Coordination and integration of class information was examined using a multidimensional similarity judgment task in which four- and nine-year-old children rated the similarity of pairs of stimuli sharing either one or two attribute values. (Author/MP)

Three different analyses have shown that the more information available in a nonverbal decoding task, the less efficiently younger subjects utilize the information relative to older ones. This differential effectiveness in the utilization of available information was discussed in terms of processing capacity, effort, and strategies for sampling a…