Identified strategies mothers use while engaged in an animal categorization activity with their preschool children. Examined the children's verbal behavior. Found that mothers' strategy use varied according to the type of information being taught. Determined the relationship between maternal strategies and verbalizations. (JPB)

Examined preschoolers' ability to map novel adjectives to object properties in two experiments. Found that 4-year-olds could extend novel adjectives from target to matching test object whether objects were drawn from same, or different, basic level categories. If 3-year-olds' first extended a novel adjective to objects in the same basic level…

Interviewed mothers to examine the developmental significance of preschoolers' imaginary companions. Found that relationships with invisible companions were described as sociable and friendly, whereas personified objects were usually nurtured. Object personification frequently occurred as a result of acquiring a toy; invisible friends were viewed…

Studied use of games to teach simple classification and seriation constructs to 3-1/2-year-old children. Found substantial and maintained improvement on classification and seriation. Found that children generalized their new understanding of classification and seriation to different problems, and found that evidence for a more general cognitive…

Compared performance of children with autism, with learning disabilities, and normally developing 4-year-olds on reasoning problems with and without instruction to use imagery. Found that instruction to use imagery led to persistent logical performance. Children with autism displayed a distinctive response pattern, performing around chance levels,…

Investigated effects of two instructional interventions on 5- to 9-year-olds who could perform a balance beam task but either could not explain the principle or had naive theories. Found that more students who had observed the experimenter model and were then encouraged to explain what they saw improved performance over the pretest than students…

Analysis of effects of different starting points on the Bayley Scales of Infant Development II Mental Scale found that starting at the child's chronological age consistently inflated scores, whereas starting at the lowest item set skewed results in the opposite direction. Testing downward until all items are passed and upward until all items are…

Reports on two studies that use new tasks to compare English children's use of strategies that reverse the order of addends in solving addition problems. Shows that knowledge of commutativity among young children is widespread, but does not establish a direct link between this knowledge and children's choice of addition strategies. (DSK)

Examined the origins of high general cognitive ability (g) in twins who were participating in the MacArthur Longitudinal Twin Study. Formed high g groups from the 19th percentile and above at each age. Results suggested increasing genetic influence and increasing genetic stability from 14 to 36 months and substantial genetic influences with…

Two experiments examined 6-month olds' ability to categorize natural infant-directed utterances. Infants heard seven different tokens from one class of utterance (comforting, approving). Findings indicated that infants who later heard a test stimulus from the unfamiliar class showed response recovery, whereas those who heard a novel stimulus from…

Whereas prior conceptions treated cognitive development as a sequence of stages, current research points to recurring growth cycles between birth and age 30. Each recurrence produces a new capacity for thinking and learning grounded in an expanded, reorganized neural network. Cognitive spurts are evident only under optimal support conditions.…

Evaluated statistically the effect of intranatal and early postnatal period factors on mental development of very low-birth-weight infants. Covariance structure analysis revealed direct influence of birth weight and gestational age in weeks on mental development at age 1, and of opthalmological aberrations and respirator disorder on mental…

Longitudinal study examined 6-year-olds' performance in tasks involving a protagonist with partial information about an object or a person. Found that children who demonstrated some understanding of the consequences of limited information access often made other errors. Despite intervening additions of contextual support and clarifications, the…

Evaluated infants' ability to form new object categories based on either visual or naming information at 16 and 20 months using an object manipulation task. Found that infants at both ages showed evidence of using visual information to categorize the objects. Only 20-month-olds used naming information. Found a correlation between vocabulary size…

Twenty-one children (ages 4-11) prelingually deaf and orally trained, were tested with verbal and nonverbal versions of a false-belief task. Children did not perform above chance in the verbal task. The nonverbal task significantly facilitated performance, however, only older children performed above change in the nonverbal false-belief tests.…