Two studies investigated how 5- to 10-year-olds integrate perceptual causality with their knowledge of the underlying causal mechanism, using two devices in which a bell would ring when a ball was dropped in, either immediately or after a delay, depending on the mechanism inside. Findings suggest a link between temporal contiguity and causality in…

Observers aged six to 24 years estimated distances between elements in patterns illustrating Gestalt grouping principles of proximity, similarity, closure, and good continuation. Magnitude of distance distortions decreased significantly with age, suggesting that perceptual development includes improving ability to disregard Gestalt groupings when…

An intermodal preference task, which presents 2 events side-by-side with a single sound track appropriate to 1 event, and measures subjects' visual preferences, was presented to 23 children with autism. Subjects showed the intermodal matching effect demonstrated with normal infants and young children; subjects did not demonstrate primary…

It is proposed here that adults process orientation information at different levels and that these levels correspond to developmental stages in the coding of orientation in childhood. (Author)

Sensory thinking is the process of bringing experienced aspects of the child's world into his focal awareness, usually through a medium such as language. (Author/IRT)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between 64 six- and seven-year-old children's perception of the reality of television and the Piagetian construct of cognitive development. The children were asked to view two television episodes (a highly similar, closely matched pair from the television series "Star Trek")…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

Factor analysis of correlations among the measures of recall clustering, free sorting, and recognition errors revealed significant convergent validity for consistent use of a semantic perceptual organization strategy in the three tasks. Ten-year-old, adult, and elderly adult subjects relied on a semantic strategy; four- and six-year-olds encoded…

A total of 100 third and ninth grade students participated in a study to determine how children of different ages perceptually segment a continuing behavior sequence presented on a television program. The children were shown a short segment from a motion picture on a videotape viewer. Following the viewing, the children completed unitizing…

Subjects of this study were 144 White, middle-class children in kindergarten, first, second, and fourth grades. Children were interviewed individually about their explanations for both academic and social outcomes and their evaluations of their own outcomes. Self-evaluations became less positive in both domains and less similar across domains with…

Describes two studies investigating the development of recursive thinking in 60 Dutch children five, seven, and nine years of age. The first study replicated earlier research employing a verbal production procedure. The second study used verbal comprehension procedures and concluded that development appears two years earlier than indicated by the…

Reviews five books: (1) "Modularity and Constraints in Language and Cognition" (Gunnar and Maratsos); (2) "Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science" (Karmiloff-Smith"; (3) "The Self-System: Developmental Changes between and within Self-Concepts" (Oosterwegel and Oppenheimer); (4)…

UNDER THE DIRECTION OF PROFESSOR BRUNER, THE CENTER FOR COGNITIVE STUDIES AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY HAS CARRIED OUT A SERIES OF STUDIES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITION. THERE HAVE BEEN OVER 30 EXPERIMENTS ON THE GROWTH OF PERCEPTION, PROBLEM-SOLVING, AND REASONING BETWEEN THE AGES OF 3 AND 10, IN PURSUIT OF A THEORY TO ACCOUNT FOR THE CHANGES IN…

This paper examines the concept of decalage from two cognitive-change positions (structures of logical thought and attentional and verbal mediators) and proposes an alternative explanation for decalage from a perceptual-change point of view. The term decalage is used to summarize the relation between differences in performance of various age…

THE FIRST OF A 3-VOLUME PERCEPTUAL MOTOR CURRICULUM, THE BOOK DESCRIBES A PROGRAM BASED ON A THEORY OF MOVEMENT WHICH THE AUTHOR LABELS MOVIGENICS (THE STUDY OF THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF PATTERNS OF MOVEMENT IN MAN AND THE RELATIONSHIP OF THESE MOVEMENTS TO HIS LEARNING EFFICIENCY). TEN BASIC CONSTRUCTS OF MOVIGENICS ARE OUTLINED, AND THE…