This article examines how children's construction of relationships in exploring materials helps to explain the constructivist foundations of the Reggio Emilia approach. A quasi-naturalistic study of 12 preschool children, ages 3 and 4 years, individually exploring different kinds of collage papers reveals a range of constructivist categories…

Previous studies show that following disorientation children use the geometry of an enclosed space to locate an object hidden in one of the corners [e.g. (Harmer, L., & Spelke, E. (1996). Modularity and development: A case of spatial reorientation. "Cognition, 61," 195-232)]. These studies have used a disorientation procedure that involves…

Four experiments investigated how readily infants achieve perceptual organization by lightness and form similarity. Infants were (a) familiarized with elements that could be organized into rows or columns on the basis of lightness or form similarity and tested with vertical versus horizontal bars depicting the familiar versus novel organization or…

Although it is acknowledged that adults integrate features into a representation of the whole face, there is still some disagreement about the onset and developmental course of holistic face processing. We tested adults and children from 4 to 6 years of age with the same paradigm measuring holistic face processing through an adaptation of the…

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)

In this study examining infants' responses to optical expansion, 18 infants between 36 and 61 days old watched expanding shadows that differed in the terminal location of the center of expansion and the number of dimensions undergoing change. Babies consistently rotated their heads upward during expansion of a closed figure when the center of…

WORD PERCEPTION IS DISCUSSED NOT AS A MECHANICAL TOOL BUT AS A THINKING PROCESS. HOW INDIVIDUALS PERCEIVE PRINTED FORMS DEPENDS ON THE STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT OF THEIR READING ABILITIES. THE BEGINNING READER PROCEEDS ON THE BASIS OF WORD FORMS HE RECOGNIZES AS WHOLES. LATER HE USES CONTEXT AND PICTURE CLUES, VERBAL CONTEXT, GENERAL CONFIGURATIONS,…