In this study the authors investigated whether children demonstrated the "underconfidence-with-practice" (UWP) effect. This effect is a highly robust metacognitive illusion in which adults become underconfident in their memory performance when asked to predict their memory for the same items across multiple study-test trials. One…

Examined in three studies were the influence of perceptual organization on children's memory and the relationship between operational thought and memory performance. In the first study, 72 children at 5, 7, and 9 years of age were given a series of Piagetian tasks and a memory task. Subjects were presented with 10 color-shape pairs depicted in…

In this study of second and fifth graders, story relevant pictures and subject generated images were presented to determine the kind of story information likely to be enhanced by real and imagined pictures. Results indicate that central and peripheral information was facilitated by visual illustrations, primarily the former. (JEG)

Kindergarteners and second-graders were shown pairs of pictures, one picture at a time, and asked to name each picture as rapidly and as accurately as possible. Pictures pairs were of four types which reflected the factorial combination of associative relatedness (high and low) with categorial relatedness (high and low). (SB)

The hypothesis that overall-similarity relations structure both adults' and children's classifications of heterogeneous objects (objects that differ in a variety of ways) was supported in two experiments. When objects varied simultaneously on many dimensions, adults and children constructed classifications that maximized within-category similarity…

A new model is proposed for explaining children's performance on Pascual-Leone's test of M-space. The new model is used to generate theoretical performance curves for children at four different age levels and seven different levels of stimulus complexity, and it is a viable alternative. Differences between the models are reviewed. (Author/RD)

This study was designed to investigate whether age differences in timesharing performance would be found if the baseline performance of younger and older children was experimentally equated. Two groups of twelve 8-year-olds and one group of twelve 13-year-olds participated. Each subject performed a compensatory tracking task and an auditory…

A study investigated the construct validity of the Visual Similes Arousal II, an instrument designed to measure arousal as it relates to affective and cognitive stimuli. Principle-axis factor analyses with oblique rotations were used for 116 younger students (ages 8-9) and 108 older students (ages 10-11). Results confirmed construct validity.…

In this study the relationship between mother's teaching style (verbal instruction vs. demonstration) and the child's performance on four memory tests was investigated. Mothers' teaching style with 9-year-old children was observed in an induced teaching situation in the home, in a Guatemalan Maya town. In the induced teaching situation, the mother…

One hundred thirty-six 5-to-10-year-old Israeli children were given three black and white photographs of a highway, a column of identical tanks, and a row of elephants, and were asked some questions on each one of the photographs in order to elicit responses of three-dimensional perception. (CM)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of organizational processes for both verbal and spatial stimulus materials within an information processing framework. Children in grades 2 and 4 and adults were tested for their ability to report letter strings reflecting various orders of approximation to English and various dot…

The effects of imagery on children's learning of verbal materials is reviewed. Paired associate learning is emphasized, with some discussion of recall, recognition, visual discrimination and prose learning. Visual versus verbal images, elaborated versus unelaborated stimuli, induced images, and physical manipulation of learning materials are…

The false recognition procedure was used to determine the relative dominance of visual and verbal memory organization at two grade levels. The results indicated that visual encoding was predominant for first graders, but that both visual and verbal encoding occurred with fourth graders. (MS)

Two experiments with 167 first-, third-, and fifth-grade children revealed age-related changes in the composition of natural categories. Categorization was investigated via perceptual similarities of objects and conceptual similarities of superordinate classes. The free-classification paradigm (Garner, 1974) was adapted to natural categories,…

This research was designed to determine whether the type of questions asked and the stimuli about which the questions were asked would have any measurable effect on the thought processes of second and fourth graders. Stimuli included a picture consisting of three illustrations, a listening stimulus composed of a story that was read to each…