Six experiments involving 262 children (as young as 16 months and as old as fifth grade) indicate that the basic framework for coding location is present early in life and that later development consists of an increasing ability to impose organization on a broad range of bounded spaces. (SLD)

Reviews current research on children's concepts and categories that reflects a growing consensus that nonperceptual knowledge is central to concepts and determines category membership, whereas perceptual knowledge is peripheral in concepts and only a rough guide to category membership. Argues that there is no compelling basis in theory or in data…

Comments on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue. Responds to the theses that perceptual information is as much at the core of concepts as is nonperceptual information and that concepts are not represented as such but are computed on-line when needed. Presents a view of the relationship between perception and conceptual knowledge…

Comments on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue. Describes a program of research that demonstrates the important influence of perception on the structure of concepts. Proposes that both perceptual and nonperceptual information are important to conceptual structure throughout the continuum of knowledge acquisition and that perception is a…

Comments on the article by Jones and Smith in this issue. Outlines different perspectives from which the issue of conceptual development is approached, elaborating on the functions concepts serve and variations in those functions. Notes points of agreement with the perceptual knowledge view and offers comments on the research supporting the…

This article presents a literature survey and conceptual model of the perceptual-motor performance of children with visual impairment, in relation to their social development. The relationships between visual impairment and orientation, visual impairment and mobility, and motor performance and social integration are examined. (Author/SW)

Discusses how use of photography in early childhood classrooms enhances visual literacy. Describes how to use photographs in the daily routine to involve parents, build children's identity, and enrich all areas of the curriculum. Also describes use of video cameras in the classroom. (HTH)

In three amplitude discrimination experiments involving a backward masking task, children's rate of perceptual processing was compared to that of adults. Developmental differences in discrimination were compensated for by increases in the psychophysical difference between test tones. No developmental differences in rate of perceptual processing…

Children's use of the middle concept was assessed in two developmental studies. Experiment 1, with kindergarten through fifth-grade students, showed marked improvement in the mastery of the middle concept across elementary grades. In Experiment 2, discrimination pretraining with two nonoverlapping stimulus sets transferred to the novel test…

Four experiments examined sources of gender differences routinely found on the water-level spatial test. Undergraduates' errors offered no evidence that less accurate responses by females than males reflected a less developed Piagetian spatial system, and that females' requisite motor skills were poorer than those of males. (MM)

Four experiments confirmed the widely accepted hypothesis that, although children as young as two engage in pretend play, even four and five year olds do not understand that pretending requires mental representation. Children appear to misconstrue pretense as its common external manifestations, such as actions, until at least age six. (MDM)

Infants' visual fixations were monitored while they viewed predictable and unpredictable sequences of stimuli. Analyses of anticipatory fixations indicated that by two months of age, infants form expectations for the reappearance of visual stimuli positioned opposite to each other. By three months, infants rapidly form expectations for asymmetric…

Representations of 40 3- to 6-year-olds' perceptions of Oedipal conflicts among family members were assessed through a doll-play task and parental diaries. Complementary information on children's understanding of family roles and age relativity was evaluated independently. Oedipal behaviors appeared to increase and then decrease during this age…

Presented five- and eight-month olds with silent moving and static video images of self, peer, and doll, and sounds of self and nonsocial objects. Found that recognition of one's image develops through experience with dynamic facial stimulation during first eight months. By five months, infants treat their faces and voices as familiar and social…

Examined three- to four-month-old infants' ability to form perceptually based categorical representation in the domains of natural kinds and artifacts. By showing the availability of perceptually driven basic and superordinate-like representations in early infancy that closely correspond to adult conceptual categories, findings underscored the…