Interviewed 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, and 10-year olds, and adults regarding their knowledge about primary-consciousness, reflective-consciousness, and control activities. Found that the recognition that people do not engage in conscious mental activities when unconscious is still developing during the late middle-childhood years. (Author/KB)

Two studies showed preschoolers have little knowledge and awareness of inner speech. Study 1 showed that, compared to 6- to 7-year olds and adults, 4-year olds usually did not infer that persons silently engaged in verbal mental activities were saying things to themselves. Study 2 demonstrated that 4- and 5-year olds are much poorer than adults at…

Three studies used illustrated stories to examine preschoolers' understanding of emotional changes when memories of past events were cued by objects in the current environment. Found substantial development between 4 and 6 years in understanding the influence of mental activity on emotions. The strength and consistency of this knowledge was…

The present study was designed to explore what subjects can and will do spontaneously in memory retrieval situations. Subjects were kindergarten, third grade and college students. (SB)

Children of ages two and one-half, three, and three and one-half years were tested for their understanding of object hiding. Results indicated that children of this age can be both nonegocentric and skillful at estimating what other people do and do not see under various viewing conditions. (JMB)

Children 3 1/2 and 5 years of age were tested for their intuitive knowledge of the psychological fact that one mental event may trigger or cue another related mental event. (JMB)

This study examined first graders' use of strategic behavior (looking more during study and categorizing during study) in response to perceiving instructions versus remembering instructions. (BRT)

The development of perspective taking was explored in kindergarten and second grade children using a referential communication task. (BRT)

This study investigated the development of the concept of a critical search area by means of an action sequence in which a cartoon character loses his toy while walking through his house. The results showed that it is not until ages 7 or 8 that children readily make the inference that the critical area is the only plausible place to search for the…

Tested and confirmed, in three experiments, the hypothesis that children's interpretation of pictorial conventions and of the expression "look like" may increase their tendency toward intellectual realism. That is, a tendency to respond to requests for perceptual reports by indicating what is known about an object or array, rather than what is…

Investigates children's knowledge of the role of message quality in referential communication and their ability to evaluate the accuracy of a listener's feedback about his/her comprehension. Children evaluated a puppet listener's comprehension after they had given complete or inadequate directions and received his report that he did or did not…

Four experiments investigated three- and four-year-old children's knowledge of projective size-distance and projective shape-orientation relationships. Results indicated that preschool children's understanding of these relationships seems at least partly cognitive rather than wholly perceptive, providing further evidence for the acquisition of…

Examines the ability to differentiate appearance-reality and Level Two perspective-taking in tactile modality among a total of 92 children aged two-four years in three studies. The results indicate that three-year-olds find tactile appearance-reality and Level Two perspective-taking tasks easier than visual ones. (RJC)

Investigates children's ability to distinguish the literal meaning of a message and a speaker's communicative intent. Either knowing or not knowing the speaker's intended referent, first- and second-grade children evaluated brief referential communication messages for ambiguity. In the first experiment, messages were written on cards and read to…