Examines whether mothers' temperament ratings of their children as easy or difficult follow the pattern of occurrence of sibling deidentification as determined by generalized alike-different judgments. Participants were 111 middle-class mothers (80 with two children and 31 with three) and 93 inner-city mothers (62 with two children and 31 with…

Describes a new observational study of home television viewing by young children which involved placement of time-lapse video cameras in the homes of five-year-olds from middle-class families for a 10-day period. Families maintained TV viewing diaries, and control groups of families were employed to assess the impact of observational equipment in…

Groups of 17-, 23-, and 29-week-olds were habituated to slides of women posing facial expressions varying display of teeth affect; subjects were then shown slides of women posing the familiarized expressions plus a toothy smiling expression. In a second experiment older subjects also proved to be insensitive to affect-related aspects of still…

Infants exposed to a set of artificially-created face stimuli having distinct mean and modal prototypes showed a pattern of behavior predicted by category abstraction models. Infants appeared to abstract, at the time of learning, a feature-count summary of the category displayed. (Author/RH)

Two experiments investigated infants' use of structural relations in dividing schematic drawings of animals into categories. Results demonstrated subjects' sensitivity to structural information like that thought by Rosch (1978) to exist in the natural world and their ability to segregate items into categories on the basis of clusters of correlated…

Infants who cried in response to a reward shift evidenced no retention of the contingency 1 week later but did have excellent retention at one day. Reactivation treatment alleviated forgetting at three weeks. Results indicate that crying in response to violation of a reward-expectation habit functions as an amnesic agent to produce accelerated…

Displaying no evidence of recognizing the axillary odors of their fathers, breastfed infants discriminated between their mother's axillary odor and odors produced by nonparturient or unfamiliar lactating females. Bottle-fed infants appeared unable to recognize the odor of their mother when presented along with odors from a nonparturient female or…

Two studies examined the relation between current developmental levels, as estimated by IQ, and proximal levels of development, as estimated by the efficiency of learning and transfer in assisted contexts. Subjects were 8- to ll-year-old children. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed. (HOD)

According to Humean framework, relations are judged to be causal to extent that they are characterized by regularity, continuity, and covariation among college students and college-bound 11- and 14-year-olds. Presents subjects with information about one of the following indices: potential causal factor covaried with effect and potential causal…

Two experiments examine use of defining, characteristic, category, and identical semantic features of word concept information in cued recall. College adults and 7- to 11-year-old children were shown word triplets in which context words were related or unrelated to final target word. Results suggest meaning features differ in providing medium for…

Extends and replicates the 1948 Soviet study by Istomina that examined the age at which children use deliberate strategies to aid recall and the effect that task context has on remembering. Subjects were 3- to 7-year-old children. Istomina's results were not replicated in this study. (HOD)

Examines the communication strategies adopted by people of differing ages attempting to perform a referential communication task and to determine their ability to adapt their strategies to various task conditions. (HOD)

A path model of genetic and shared family environmental transmission was fitted to general cognitive ability data from 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old adopted and nonadopted children and their parents to assess the etiology of longitudinal stability from infancy to early childhood. (HOD)

A four-and-a-half-year longitudinal experiment reconsidered the contribution of organic impairment to the genesis of mild mental retardation among disadvantaged children. It was hypothesized that nonoptimal perinatal conditions might result in deficits that increase a child's vulnerability to environmental risk factors. Study results supported the…

Discusses both the advantages and difficulties of using nonlinear modeling in the context of a model used to study the relations between parental warmth and control and preschool children's competence. (HOD)