Four experiments examined the prominence of place and action representation in the story representations of second-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children and college students. Results suggested that place inconsistency is more important than action inconsistency in children's judgments of story adequacy except when the action involves the story theme.…

Investigated the application of verbal praise as a reward with 84 third and fourth grade children who completed a digit-symbol coding task under contingent versus noncontingent and direct versus implicit reward conditions. Noncontingent rewards possessed no significant reinforcer effect under either reward condition. (SKC)

Investigated the assumption that different aspects of visual selectivity depend on common processing resources by engaging observers aged 5, 7, 9, and 24 years in a task designed to examine the relations between covert shifts of attention and filtering. Covert orienting and filtering shared processing resources; filtering ability improved with…

Investigated whether young children (ages 2-5) could use spatial categorization as a mnemonic strategy. Three experiments found the children capable of spatially organizing objects as a strategy in the service of future retrieval. There were clear developmental trends in the deployment of categorization. (SKC)

Four experiments investigated children's confusion regarding memories of what they said and what they imagined saying. The ability to distinguish imagined from actually uttered words increased with age, while performance in sentence completion tasks decreased. Metamemory suggestions did not affect elaborations. (SAK)

Investigated the ability of children aged five, six, and seven years to categorize rhyming words. Children were better able to group words that shared rimes (speech units) than those with common syllable onsets. Results suggest that children who are not yet able to read are aware of single phonemes when they coincide with onset. (SAK)

Parents' goal orientations in parent-child reminiscing were examined in this study, where 28 preschoolers (mean age = 46 months) experienced a standardized event. Dyads discussed the event that evening, with parents randomly assigned to either an "outcome-oriented" or a "process-oriented" condition. Outcome-oriented parents, who were told that…

Measured covert shifts of visual attention of observers aged 6, 8, and 20 years in a speeded classification task. There were differences between children's and adults' attention orientation, target processing, and use of predictability in cues. (SAK)

Three studies looked at kindergarten, third and sixth grade students' and adults' comprehension of different types of adaptation or contrast effects for weight and temperature. Results showed improvement up to college age and revealed the importance of using older children in studies of developing theories of the mind. (SAK)

Investigated the influence of age and artistic inclination on the use of articulation and line quality in judging similarity and preference for simple human drawings. Children aged 4, 5, 10, and 13 years revealed articulation to be the primary criterion in similarity judgments. Preference patterns differed somewhat by age. (SKC)

Examines ways in which young children's decision making is affected by decision reversibility and decision importance. Results suggest that even young children are affected by manipulations of the decision situation, and that basic decision processes develop rapidly with age. (SKC)

Six experiments examined the problems third graders, sixth graders, and college students had in gaining access to episodic information while retrieving information from memory. Results suggested that conceptual access problems vary with grade and that elaboration of the representation of an episode facilitates access. (Author/SKC)

Focused on the developmental acquisition of the conditional implication interpretation of "if-then." Knowledge of three aspects of this interpretation was assessed for adults and 3rd-, 5th- and 8th-graders. Results showed the older three groups were significantly more likely to understand conditional implication, with improvement…

Obtained thresholds for octave-band noises with center frequencies of 0.4, 1, 2, 4, and 10 kHz and 1/3-octave band noises centered at 10 and 20 kHz from children aged 6 to 16 years. Compared results with findings for infants, preschool children, and adults. Continuing sensitivity improvements were evident from infancy well into the school years.…

Examined ways in which irrelevant variations within a stimulus set interfered with performances of second and fifth graders and adults in a selective attention task. Stimuli were constructed from spatially integrated dimensions in experiment 1 and spatially separated dimensions in experiment 2. Developmental differences in perceived structure were…