To obtain reliable information, it is important to identify and effectively question knowledgeable informants. Two experiments examined how age and the ease of distinguishing between reliable and unreliable sources influence children's ability to effectively question those sources to solve problems. A sample of 3- to 5-year-olds was introduced to…

In this study 56 prekindergarten and 174 kindergarten children learned to choose either the card with more or the card with fewer elements in simultaneous discrimination problems. Learning was faster when the card with more elements was positive, particularly when a zero-element card was involved. (Author/SB)

Investigated what makes young children acknowledge a false belief held by another person. Showed movies in which a stereotypical item in a familiar box was replaced by one character with an atypical item. Found highly significant improvement in preschoolers' acknowledgment of second character's false belief when preschoolers saw stereotypical…

Compared the recognition, perceptual saliency, and naming of color to that of other perceptual object attributes in 2- to 5-year-olds as a function of language age. Found that although color was perceptually salient relative to other visual attributes, no selective impairment to color cognition was found relative to motion, form, and size.…

Two studies examined how task content that activates predator-avoidance affects preschool children's performance on a false-belief task. Findings indicated that the proportion of correct answers on the playmate-avoidance task was greater than that for the predator-avoidance task, suggesting that activation of the predator-avoidance system…

Compared 40 3-year-olds' superordinate level classification under 2 experimental conditions. Although there was no mean difference between the 2 conditions, there were striking differences in the distribution of scores. (RJC)

Results of two experiments with five-year-olds indicated that: (1) conservation can be quickly taught with lasting results; (2) training on a limited range of exemplars will produce generalized correct responses to other, untrained classes of conservation problems; and (3) children's explanations of their judgments change as a result of exposure…

Studies three- and four-year-olds' answers to "before,""after," and "when"questions referring to pictured event sequences having invariant or arbitary real-world temporal orders. Results indicated the development of the ability to coordinate lexical knowledge with cognitive demands associated with responding to…

Examined Piaget's claim that young children have difficulties constructing common multiples because of an inability to abstract the number of actions performed to obtain a number of objects. Subjects were two groups of preschool children in sharing tasks. Results showed improvement in performance based on certain conditions, but the significance…

Five experiments examined matching to sample procedures among preschoolers. Results indicated that children selected taxonomic comparisons more often than thematic comparisons, independent of age, gender, instructions, order of trial type, specificity of feedback, presence of unrelated third comparisons, and level of taxonomy. Instructions to…

Tested hypothesized relationship between development of a theory of mind and increasing computational resources in 3- to 5-year olds. Found that the correlations between performance on theory of mind tasks and dual processing tasks were as high as r=.64, suggesting that changes in working memory capacity allow the expression of, and arguably the…

Examined whether preschoolers could recognize numerical equivalence for comparisons involving sequentially presented sets. Found that children recognized numerical equivalence for static sets earlier than for sequential sets. Memory of the number of sequentially presented objects emerged earlier than memory for the number of sequential events.…

List repetitions in lists with phonologically similar and dissimilar items were used to examine improvement in preschool children's recall. Cumulative repetition caused a moderate increase in memory span and the phonological similarity effect. Repeated serial order information was helpful for children's recall, but articulatory coding was not. (BC)

Examined whether preschool children focus on a small number of attributes or attend to whole exemplars in learning basic categories for fictitious animals. Found little evidence that children employed rules, but found strong evidence that children encoded exemplars as integrated wholes during category training. Discusses implications for theories…

Four-year-olds succeeded in making comparisons between sets of objects when comparison questions called for comparing set with set or subset with subset. However, when comparison questions called for comparing set with subset, the children failed to complete such tasks successfully. (Author/DB)