Recent research on children's conceptual and procedural knowledge has suggested that there are individual differences in the ways that children combine these two types of knowledge across a number of mathematical topics. Cluster analyses have demonstrated that some children have more conceptual knowledge, some children have more procedural…

Sex differences in adults' observations and ratings of children's aggression was studied in a sample of preschool children (N=89, mean age=44.00 months, SD=8.48). When examining the direct observations made by trained observers, male observers, relative to female observers, more frequently recorded aggressive bouts, especially of boys. On rating…

Two experiments tested the existence of assumed hierarchical patterns for children's recall of expository text. Results from both experiments support the notion that there is probably no single optimal hierarchical structure for storage and retrieval of expository text. (Author/MP)

The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the…

Reports on connectionist models that simulated the formation of global-level and basic-level representations in young infants; revealed a global-to-basic order of category emergence; uncovered formation of two global-level representations--initial "self-organizing" perceptual level and subsequent "trained," non-perceptual…

Studied 49 3 and 4 year olds in an examination of the effect of type of reward agent on children's discounting. Findings indicated that the combination of a negative valence and a particular social role accounted for the discounting of intrinsic interest. This suggests that social knowledge guides the application of the discounting schema. (SH)

Investigates the effects of schematic and categorical organization on young children's recall of a taxonomic list or a story in an alternate or a successive condition. Preschool children's story recall was well organized, but their list recall was poorly organized. Kindergarten children's recall of both the story and the list was well organized.…

Two studies tested the hunter-gatherer theory predicting that females should have better incidental memory for objects and locations than males. Subjects were 3- to 6-year olds and adults. Results indicated that females and males remembered more toys or objects congruent with their own sex but that there was no overall advantage for females.…

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 preschool and first-grade children's recall and recognition memory for two types of atypical actions: irrelevancies and disruptions, and for script actions (schemata). Children recalled disruptions better than irrelevancies in stories about familiar events, especially with delayed recall. Script actions were least well recalled. (SKC)

Facility in shifting between familiar schemata in a listening comprehension task was examined in children from the third and sixth grades. Analyses of free recall and interview responses showed deficiencies in children's cognitive monitoring of the prose-schema interaction. (Author/CI)

Three studies investigated 5- to 8-year-olds' ability to solve partitive division problems when presented with a concrete model of a problem. Children found it easier to solve problems in Grouping-by-Divisor condition than in Grouping-by-Quotient condition, although there was evidence of developmental improvement in tasks. Findings suggest that…

Examines development of event memory by determining how personally experienced events with two types of structure were reported by kindergartners and adults. Events in making and playing with clay were organized causally and temporally. Results show that adults and children used a goal-based hierarchical structure to remember events, although use…

Investigates the applicability of the self-as-schema model to children and examines the extent of negative self-schemas in relatively depressed children among 61 elementary school students; most of the students were between 8 and 12 years old. Results were consistent with the self-as-schema hypotheses, and mood congruent content-specific recall…

Preschool and first grade children's recall of script-based event sequences was studied in four different instruction conditions. Differences in sequencing ability were observed in relation to age and sequence. Findings indicate that at both ages, the effort involved in sequencing aids semantic processing of the material and enhances recall. (SH)