Examined impact of biological father on young children's (n=1,688) cognitive and behavior adjustment. Used data from 1986 Child Supplement of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to assess relationship between father's coresidence in household over child's first three years and adjustment. Findings suggest that father-effects operated through…

Two experiments examined preschoolers' ability to apply multiple labels to representational objects and to people. Found that preschoolers reliably produced or accepted several words per entity and accepted a high percentage of class-inclusive and overlapping word pairs. The mean number of words produced in labeling task was related to receptive…

Four studies assessed whether children and adults saw categorization decisions as objective matters of fact or as invented conventions. Found that preschoolers treated basic-level animal and human-made artifact category decisions as objective, with kinds of animals treated as more objective than kinds of artifacts. Adults' judgments were similar…

Examined 18-month olds' intermodal and verbal knowledge about gender. Presented photos of adults or children paired with a female or male voice, or with gender labels. With adult pictures, subjects spent more time looking at pictures with matching voices than at those with mismatched voices. With children's pictures, subjects failed to match faces…

Suggests that social interaction of a child in the role of tutor in guided environments allows the building of geometrical concepts in nursery school based on strategies formed in natural settings. Shows a systemic improvement in students' performances when different contexts of guidance were used. (DSK)

Presents a unified theoretical approach to children's false-memory reports that deals with both spontaneous and implanted reports. Details false recognition and misinformation models that allow researchers to determine the impact of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, and similarity judgment in false memory reports. (LBT)

Notes that there has been far less mathematical modeling of children's memory than of adults' memory. Explores the flaw in fuzzy-trace model, and maintains that situations in which partial verbatim information is used along with partial gist information fall outside the boundary of this type of model. Suggests refining the concepts of and…

Notes that a multitude of studies have demonstrated that misleading postevent information affects people's memories. Contents that the fuzzy-trace theory is a positive step toward understanding the malleability of memory. Discusses fuzzy-trace theory in terms of three primary areas of study: altered response format, maximized misinformation…

Notes that spontaneous false memories are a routine part of everyday memory and more common than implanted false memory. Commends the fuzzy-trace theory for the separation and explanation of these two sources of inaccuracy. Demonstrates the theory's handling of three phenomena concerning the creation and maintenance of false memories. (LBT)

Notes that fuzzy-trace theory provides a link between indices of memory performance and the theoretical processes that underlie that performance. Author argues false memories can arise because of processes that normally affect forgetting. Maintains that, to the extent that memories lose their distinctive properties, such memories may become…

Suggests that fuzzy-trace theory may replace dominant metaphors of cognitive development. Discusses theoretical climate of the 1980s when the theory was first formulated. Describes how, by integrating new ideas about how cognitive development was viewed into a coherent framework, the theory slowly gained acceptance as critical aspects of it were…

Four experiments and an analysis of pooled data from English and Japanese children show a linear increase in understanding false beliefs with number of older siblings; no such effect for children younger than 38 months; no helpful effect of younger siblings at any age; no effect of siblings' gender; and no helpful effect of siblings on a source…

Presents a four-phase model that could help infuse constructivist practice into preservice teacher education courses. The phases include engagement (grounding the course in students' beliefs and experiences), connection (developing students' expertise for resolving later ambiguities), application (applying students' reconstructed understanding of…

Discusses motivations for research replications and makes recommendations for appropriate research strategies. Illustrates research strategies in a review of studies replicating a 1948 study by Soviet psychologist Z.M. Istomina on preschoolers' memory. Concludes that none of the studies closely replicated Istomina's methods, but some replicated…

Examined relationship between children's ability to infer the veracity of an adult's statement and the adult's informedness. Found that children tended to believe utterances from speakers who were better informed than they themselves were and to disbelieve less well-informed speakers, with no age-related differences. Children gave explicit…