Discusses C. Milbrath's thesis that artistically talented and less talented children follow different developmental paths because they rely on different ways of responding to the world. Relates this thesis to studies of the childhood work of Paul Klee, Henri Toulouse Lautrec, and Pablo Picasso. (SLD)

Examines preschoolers' understanding of non-observable causal mechanism in causes of illness. Three studies were conducted using subjects from university child care centers. Subjects average five years of age. Results indicated that preschoolers recognize that appearances may be deceiving when it comes to judging causes of illness. Discusses…

Four experiments utilizing the familiarization-novelty preference procedure examined whether 3- and 4-month-olds could form categorical representations for cats versus dogs from the perceptual information available in silhouettes. Findings indicated that general shape or external contour information centered about the head was sufficient for…

Current work has yielded differential findings regarding infants' ability to perceptually detect the causal structure of a means-end support sequence. Resolving this debate has important implications for perception-action dissociations in this domain of object knowledge. In Study 1, 12-month-old infants' ability to perceive the causal structure of…

One of the important nutrients during pregnancy is vitamin A or related compounds called retinoids. Although it is well-known that vitamin A deficiency may be detrimental to foetal development, overdosage of retinoids might cause developmental defects, particularly affecting the central nervous system development of the foetus, causing hindbrain…

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested learners of Hebrew, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors with those of English learners. We analyzed letter-naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal…

Inverted black-white photographs of faces of very familiar peers were shown to subjects 3-20 years old who were asked to identify photographed persons. Results showed a correlation between recognition ability and age up to 14 years and performance deterioration after this age. Results are discussed in terms of overlearning of mono-oriented…

A study on the effects of birth order on infants' reactions to novel persons was conducted to test the differing predictions of incongruity theory and social interaction theory. Findings indicated that infants' reactions to novel persons are determined by infants' social interaction within the family during the first year rather than by the number…

In an evaluation of the relation between dimensional salience and preschoolers' judgments of bigness, 3-year-old children were shown triads of rectangles and asked to select the "big" one. The biggest rectangle in each triad was neither the tallest nor the widest. (JMB)

Two experiments study the effects of age and sex on the ability of 3-1/2- to 6-year-old children to use nonverbal cues in identifying affiliative relationships. (SDH)

This paper describes a delayed response experiment which tested children's memory for the location of a hidden object. Eight boys and eight girls at each of two age levels (25 and 37 months) were assigned to each of four experimental conditions and given eight trials in a 9-choice task. On each trial the child saw the object hidden in one of nine…

Examined the effects of two levels of causality (intentional-accidental), outcome quality (good-bad), and affected object (human being-physical object) on the evaluations of acts and actors and the related response latencies. Four age groups of 128 children (5-11 years) were studied, using eight stories and two 4-point scales of good-bad and…

Examined 3- and 4-year-olds with regard to their abilities in recognizing differences between certain speech sounds and their performance in imitating and spontaneously generating the same sounds in familiar words. Results are related to a theory of phonemic development in children. (Author/SDH)