Three experiments investigated the conditions under which redundant verbal information would facilitate a listener's performance. Kindergarteners, first graders, and fourth graders were asked to select which of several groups of pictures a message (either redundant or constructive) described. Verbal redundancy was found to facilitate only older…

Investigates the effects of predisposed and distinctiveness-based salience on children's classifications in 96 preschoolers and fifth graders given a classification task designed to reflect a developmental shift from integral to separable perception. (Author/MP)

Infants 8.5 and 9.5 months of age were tested for ability to determine the location of an object hidden in one of two covered containers before their left-right positions were reversed. Only the older infants provided with different colored covers to their containers were able to do this task. (Author/DB)

Examined six- and eight-year-old children's use of contextual expectations to detect inconsistencies in story information and their ability to discriminate between information that resolved or was irrelevant to these inconsistencies. Results showed that six-year-olds frequently detected inconsistent events but that they failed to discriminate…

Tested competing hypotheses about the acquisition of terms that refer to relationships in both time and space. Hypotheses were as follows: (1) language of time is acquired as a spatial metaphor; and (2) differential experience with the dual senses of each term results in different acquisition patterns depending upon which sense dominates actual…

Assesses children's ability to coordinate information in the context of perspective taking and moral judgment tasks and tests the assumption that both perspective taking and moral judgment involve a common decentering process. Subjects were first and third graders. (MP)

Results confirmed that children differentially use knowledge of results and suggested that any description of motor skill acquisition must account for the complex interaction between developmental level and the difficulty of the task at hand. (Author/DB)

Investigated (1) whether young children can extract a story's main idea, (2) how much they can recall from stories, (3) whether their recall is related to the main theme, (4) whether recall occurs in logical sequence, and (5) from which part of a story more ideas are remembered. (Author/DB)

Performance on a 10-digit task distinguished aged impaired subjects from normals. When subjects were required to dial the series on a telephone apparatus rather than to report it verbally, differences were maximized. Under this condition, aged unimpaired subjects performed at a significantly lower level than young normals. (Author/BEF)

The findings provide evidence that the learning disabled develop most cognitive abilities in a manner similar to that of their normal counterparts, though perhaps slightly delayed, and that by adolescence, development in the learning disabled approaches that of normals. (Author/DLS)

Forty elementary children (six and nine year olds) and 20 college students were required to discriminate identical pairs of visual stimuli from mirror images. It was hypothesized that a key factor in performance would be the extent to which orientation was a functionally significant attribute of the stimuli. (Author/MP)

Studies the effects of perceptual salience on performance in problems requiring the coordination of information. Subjects were groups of children, younger adults, and older adults. For each of the age groups, those problems containing the most salient information were solved faster and more accurately than problems containing the least salient…

In order to study developmental and task-related factors in ability to coordinate two dimensions, a simple multiplicative relations matrix task was presented to 51 children in kindergarten and grades 1 and 2. (MS)