The use of a verbal rehearsal strategy (repeating the items to be remembered to oneself in serial order) has been identified as a key factor in explaining working memory (WM) development. However, the debate remains open with regard to the age at which children are able to use it, and the actual benefits of using such a strategy. Numerous…

"Patterning" is a cognitive intervention that is unknown to psychologists, but has nevertheless been taught for half a century in nearly all kindergartens and many preschools in English-speaking countries. Patterning is the understanding that a certain rule governs the sequence of items in a series. At the simplest level, if the series…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Children's imitation of adults plays a prominent role in human cognitive development. However, few studies have investigated how children represent the complex structure of observed actions which underlies their imitation. We integrate theories of action segmentation, memory, and imitation to investigate whether children's event representation is…

When placing numbers along a number line with endpoints 0 and 1000, children generally space numbers logarithmically until around the age of 7, when they shift to a predominantly linear pattern of responding. This developmental shift of responding on the number placement task has been argued to be indicative of a shift in the format of the…

The relationship among the Piagetian concepts of identity, seriation, and transitivity was explored with preschool subjects. (JMB)

This study examined the relationship between knowledge of sequence relations and the process of mental rotation in four-year-olds. Subjects were 12 preschool children who were tested individually. They were given a State Comparison Task (SCT) in which they were shown pairs of animal pictures, half identical and half mirror images of one another,…

This paper describes a computer model that simulates the way children develop the reasoning skills of transitive inference and the construction of ordered sets. The computer model begins from general operations, such as setting and removing goals, storing and retrieving information, comparing elements to find matches, reading premises, and giving…

Five-year-old children were trained on the length relationships between adjacent members of a five-term series of sticks, and subsequently tested on their abilities (1) to judge the length relationships between nonadjacent pairs of the series, and (2) to incorporate an unseen novel stick into the series through inference. (CM)

This study focused on the developmental ability of 5, 7, ll, and 19 year olds to use a cognitive strategy to recall a series of eight movements under conditions of randomness, order, or randomness with training to organize. Results are discussed. (Author/MT)

Strategies young children used to correct errors in nesting seriated cups changed substantially with age, becoming increasingly more flexible and involving more extensive restructuring of the relationships among the cups. The same trend toward increasing flexibility of thought and action also appeared in procedures children used to combine the…

Two studies (1) compared the ability of pre- and post-operational children to seriate sets of 4 temporal sequences presented simultaneously and (2) examined the ability to recall sequences when given the initial, middle, or terminal item as a retrieval cue. (SB)

Study concerned with the mechanisms in terms of which the developmental transformation from one cognitive structure to another occurs. (Author)

Considers the controversy between Bruner "et al." (1966) and Piaget (Inhelder & Piaget, 1964) followed up by Sinclair-de-Zwart (1967) concerning the role of language in the cognitive development of children between the ages of 5 and 7. (Author/RK)