Children are limited in visual search accuracy and this ability increases from childhood to adolescence. Developmental limitations in visual search could be related to children's difficulties in efficiently planning and executing their search, often assessed with cancellation tasks. However, few studies have examined age-related changes in visual…

This research tests whether analogical learning is present before language comprehension. Three-month-old infants were habituated to a series of analogous pairs, instantiating either the "same" relation (e.g., AA, BB, etc.) or the "different" relation (e.g., AB, CD, etc.), and then tested with further exemplars of the…

Ability tests play an important role in the assessment programs of many schools. However, the inferences about ability made from such tests presume that students understand the tasks they are attempting. Task familiarity can vary by student as well as by format. By design, nonverbal reasoning tests use formats that are intended to be novel. The…

A nonverbal assessment procedure was designed to characterize cognition using a Piagetian framework with six autistic children, five echolalic and one nonverbal, ranging in age from 4.8 to 15.2. All six children evidenced competence beyond sensorimotor Stage VI, and demonstrated cognitive functioning between the periods of early preoperational and…

Tests the hypothesis that the presence of attentional deficits in autistic children interferes with their performance on tests of intellectual development and status. Twelve autistic, 12 normal, and 12 trainable mentally retarded children ages four through nine were administered six "Piagetian" tasks assessing performance at…

Data gathered on 92 girls (6-10 years of age) tested on Piagetian conservation tasks supports a theory of perceptual activity leading to decentration and indicates a change in viewing strategy associated with change in conservation status. (WY)

The relationship between nutritional status and intellectual capacity in 6-year-old children was investigated in 83 subjects of medium-high socio-economic status, without any apparent risk of malnutrition and normal or high intellectual capacity. Nutritional status was evaluated by measuring food consumption, anthropometrical measurements and…

Findings indicate that (1) development of probability reasoning can be shown by an increasing monotonic trend with age, (2) verbal tests assess different aspects of this development than do nonverbal tests, (3) Piaget's ontogenetic age brackets are accurate, and (4) sex and intelligence are not significant variables. (MH)

A study of the responses made to problems selected from Raven's Progressive Matrices showed differences in the kinds of errors typically made by eighteen-year-old students. Nine problems were used and the 68 subjects were told to draw their answers on the answer sheets. There were two trials per puzzle. A classification system, devised for errors,…

Investigates the visual resemblance sorting cognitive abilities of 120 Hawaiian and 100 Malaysian first-grade children using five booklets, each containing seven test drawings. Results revealed that the performance of the two groups was about the same. The difference in scores for four of the five booklets was not significant. (HM)

A study investigated developments in reasoning and memory as reflected by the discovery strategies of children taking part in a manipulative categorization and recall task. A total of 40 children (8 each of 18, 24, 30, 36, and 42 months of age) participated. Stimulus materials consisting of blocks, toy plates, discs, and plastic trees were…

Summarized are the development and evaluation of a quasi non-verbal Cognitive Skills Test (CST) to measure comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis in hearing impaired adolescents. It is explained that the measure was evaluated with 113 students at a school for the deaf over a 2-year period. Among findings reported are that the test and…

The two-level theory of mental abilities posits two broad classes of ability: level I (learning and memory) and level II (the "g" factor of intelligence tests, reasoning, abstraction, and problem solving). Levels I and II are hypothesized to interact with SES and/or race such that: (l) SES differences are greater for level II than for I,…