The most common behavioral technique used to study infant perception, cognition, language, and social development is some variant of looking time. Since its inception as a reliable method in the late 1950s, a tremendous increase in knowledge about infant competencies has been gained by inferences made from measures of looking time. Here we examine…

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…

Three experiments assessed the ability of 2 to 5-year-old children to infer, under very simple task conditions, what another person sees when viewing something from a position other than the children's own. (ST)

Examines preschoolers' understanding of non-observable causal mechanism in causes of illness. Three studies were conducted using subjects from university child care centers. Subjects average five years of age. Results indicated that preschoolers recognize that appearances may be deceiving when it comes to judging causes of illness. Discusses…

The conservation of distance and of length and the awareness of the horizontal and of the vertical do seem to significantly precede the measurement of length, but the results did not indicate that these four tasks have any developmental order among themselves. Bibliography, charts. (Author)

Describes two experiments that assessed young children's understanding of the characteristic uncertainty in the physical nature of random phenomena as well as the unpredictability of outcomes. (HOD)

Individuals may be able to exert considerable control over their perceptual experience and environmental awareness by deliberately varying their "cognitive sets" - plans for selecting and processing information. This theme is explored and a research project, which included eleven experiments, on the effects of cognitive sets is reported. (BT)

This study sought to assess the ontogenetic course of three classes of size-value phenomena. Size-value phenomena refers to the observation that valued and neutral objects physically equal in size are judged as unequal. Results are discussed in terms of perceptual development. (ST)

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)

Examined the ability of 1-year olds to remember the location of nonvisible targets. Found that infants were able to associate a nonvisible target with a direct landmark and to code its distance and direction with respect to themselves or the larger framework. Difficulty of coding with indirect landmarks was associated with cognitive complexity and…

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)

Examined 2-month-old infants' perception of sparse random-dot displays depicting an illusory shape against a background in three experiments in which background texture, luminance cues, and relative motion information were added or deleted. Found that infants preferred novel stimuli in each condition, revealing an early capacity to perceive shape…

Person perception is used in this study to refer to the behavioral domain which is also called interpersonal or social perception. This domain typically consists of judgments of other persons' actions, expressions, or intentions. Three groups of 10 children differing on IQ and CA comprised the subject population. One group was gifted, one average,…

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…

Witkin's concepts of field dependence-independence and restructing are discussed with reference to studies in Russia and in the Netherlands. These concepts are related to differences in style of perception and to success on both cognitive tasks and social tasks. It is suggested that restructing abilities may be trained and restructing ability may…