The objective of this study was to describe the developmental progression of counterfactual reasoning from childhood to adulthood. In contrast to the traditional view, it was recently reported by Rafetseder and colleagues that even a majority of 6-year-old children do not engage in counterfactual reasoning when asked counterfactual questions…

We present two studies that examined developmental differences in the implicit and explicit acquisition of category knowledge. College-attending adults consistently outperformed school-age children on two separate information-integration paradigms due to children's more frequent use of an explicit rule-based strategy. Accuracy rates were also…

Previous research has suggested that a mid-band of spatial frequencies is critical to face recognition in adults, but few studies have explored the development of this bias in children. We present a paradigm adapted from the adult literature to test spatial frequency biases throughout development. Faces were presented on a screen with particular…

Several models assume that working memory development depends on age-related increases in efficiency and speed of processing. However, age-related increases in the efficiency of the mechanisms that counteract forgetting and restore memory traces may also be important. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments by manipulating both the…

In this study, 2.5-, 3-, and 4-year-olds (N=108) participated in a novel noun generalization task in which background context was manipulated. During the learning phase of each trial, children were presented with exemplars in one or multiple background contexts. At the test, children were asked to generalize to a novel exemplar in either the same…

The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural information in this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adults needed to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participants needed to recognize the emotion displayed by…

An experiment with 4-, 7-, and 18-year olds investigated classifications of multidimensional objects to test whether the valuing of identity as a classification criterion occurs early in development; the distribution of attention to multiple relations increases with development; and the role of separate, component relations in solving…

Preferences for moving versus static bars were assessed in 8-, 16-, and 20-week-old infants. Findings revealed that at both 16 and 20 weeks, preferences were affected only by the velocity of the bar's movement. This effect persisted at 20 weeks even when static reference features were added to the display. (RH)

The goal of this study was to determine some of the factors that contribute to developmental differences children and adults display when they use cues to retrieve specific memories. (PCB)

Describes psychological approaches to study of cognition and emotion, identifies issues that may provide direction to understanding the organization and integration of cognition and emotion in development. Maintains that an integrative model for the study of "cogmotion" is needed, suggesting that cogmotion research will contribute to the exchange…

Examined the disruption effect in two recall experiments with six- and eight-year olds. In the first experiment, vivid irrelevant actions were better recalled than disruptions that were obstacles, but were not better recalled than disruptions that were distractions. Results of the second experiment suggest that disruptions that lead to more…

This study examined age-related change in the ability to inhibit responses using two varieties of the stop signal paradigm. Three age groups (29 7-year-olds, 24 10-year-olds, and 28 young adults) performed first on a visual choice reaction task in which the spatial mapping between the go signal and response was varied between blocks. The choice…

Examined memory in 8- to 12-year-olds classified as either strategic or non-strategic on a sort-recall pretest. Found, at the end of 11 weeks, that changes to strategic behavior occurred suddenly rather than gradually. Once children began using organizational strategies, recall improved immediately. Deliberate strategy use was reflected in sorting…

Examined relationships between three components of tasks used in developmental studies of attention--visual search, filtering, and priming--as measured in tasks performed by children and adults. (PCB)

Examined developmental differences in the acquisition and extension of an organizational strategy in 2 experiments involving 242 children in grades 3, 4, 5, and 7. Levels of performance were greater for sets of typical items than for sets of atypical items at all grade levels. (RJC)