Thirty-six kindergartners were asked to respond to questions and construct figures designed to test their knowledge of hierarchical relations. Subjects had considerable knowledge of subset and superset classification, and could draw transitive inferences with little difficulty; however, they appeared to have little appreciation of the asymmetry…

Deals with memory for lists of items. The literature is briefly reviewed, and the main difficulties for traditional explanations of serial order effects are noted. (RK)

Shows that the construction of mental representations that capture a situation based on the comprehension of a diagram are mediated by the possession of appropriate background knowledge. Indicates that background knowledge deficiencies may make it difficult for beginning students of a domain to construct suitable mental representations from…