To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

The focus of this study was the developmental pattern of the ability to shift attention between global and local levels of hierarchical stimuli. Children aged 7 years and 11 years and 21-year-old adults were administered a task (two experiments) that allowed for the examination of 1) the direction of attention to global or local stimulus levels;…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the demographic variables of tenure and functional track have a moderating effect on the strategic leadership of school leaders. Design/methodology/approach: Using a conceptual framework developed by the researcher, a static/cross-sectional questionnaire-based study on a convenience…

This paper considers the discursive production of violence in the context of educational markets. Drawing on a larger study of sexually violent incidents that occurred in an elite private boys' school in Sydney, Australia, in 2000, the paper examines disciplinary traditions and communicative practices surrounding these events. Insights from Michel…

Three studies examined preschool children's understanding of categorical hierarchies, testing their ability to form categories at different levels of generality and to include the same objects in multiple categories. Found that, contrary to the implications of previous studies, two- and three-year olds appear to have both categorization skills.…

Examines the relative utility of exemplar and linguistic information for acquiring basic and superordinate categories. Developmental differences were predicted in the ability to benefit from the linguistically specified information. Preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children were tested. (Author/SS)

Asked children and adults to recall events from "Sesame Street." Found that subjects' memory was influenced by causal factors (number of causal relations to other events, place in the story's causal chain) and this influence increased with age; children recalled actions, whereas adults recalled protagonists' goals; and children's recall…

This study investigated the hypothesis that prerequisite skills in a seriation learning hierarchy mediate positive transfer for superordinate skills. In addition, the effect of instructional conditions involving modeling combined with variations in feedback on skill acquisition at different levels in the seriation sequence was examined.…

Second, fourth, and sixth graders were given passage of text whose material could be represented as four-level class inclusion hierarchy. Students were asked to construct external representation of passage and answer questions that required them to reason about contents of passage. Quality of representation and performance on question tasks were…

Four studies examined developmental differences in the representation of basic-subordinate inclusion relationships in three-, five-, and seven-year olds and undergraduates. Found that even three-year olds showed rudimentary knowledge of the asymmetry of inclusion. There was a marked developmental gap between producing subordinate category names…

During socialization, individuals begin to understand increasingly broader and more abstract units of personal and social reality. Subjects (N=97) ranging in age from 13 to late middle age completed a linguistic task in which they could impose higher order conceptions on lower order descriptions by identifying different level similarities within…

Relations among dominance, sociometric preference, and social behavior were examined in groups of unacquainted first and third grade boys meeting in play sessions. Younger groups with high aggression showed less coherent organization than did others. Dominance was associated with social preference in younger groups, and with leadership in older…

Business firms are an integral part of the age stratification structure of society. Although the age structures of people and roles within the organization are dynamic, these structures yield a fairly stable strata in which norms exist to suggest the various roles expected of certain persons. Those in roles with greater financial rewards, power,…