Studies the allocation of attention of 100 four- and five-year-olds on a selective attention task. Results suggest that preschoolers are capable of using selective strategies when the task is made meaningful by the inclusion of a familiar script that provides supportive cognitive context. (RJC)

This study of 114 children between seven and nine years used a procedure for directly observing child-produced and experimenter-produced strategies to examine the transitional period of strategy development. Findings revealed gradual changes in children's ability to produce, and to benefit from, a strategy of selective attention. (RH)

Results of a study involving 30 infants of 14, 20, or 26 weeks confirm the existence of distinct developmental phases of attention during the visual preference procedure. Findings suggest a refinement of the use of fixation duration as the major dependent variable in the procedure. (RH)

A sample of 44 infants of five months of age showed a significant reaching preference for the apparently nearer region of a computer-generated display. This indicated that the infants were sensitive to boundary flow information for depth at an edge. (RH)

Findings confirmed that newborns turn toward laterally presented sounds, habituate with repetition, recover to novel sounds, and extend demonstrations of recovery to discrepant stimuli. Recovery was found to be a curvilinear function of degree of discrepancy. Newborns systematically turned away from redundant stimuli. (RH)

Aimed to determine to what degree newborns' auditory brainstem evoked responses (ABRs) predict delayed or impaired development during the first year. When 93 infants' ABRs were evaluated at three, six, and nine months, newborn ABR was moderately sensitive for detecting hearing impairment and more sensitive than other indicators in detecting…

Investigated the distinctiveness and recognizability of taste-elicited facial expressions in 12 newborns two hours of age. Findings demonstrated that newborns differentiate sour and bitter from each other and from salty, and discriminate between sweet and nonsweet. Judges accurately identified newborns' responses to sucrose, but systematically…

A total of 73 three- to six-month-old infants of depressed and nondepressed mothers were videotaped in face-to-face interactions with their mothers and with nondepressed female strangers. Depressed mothers and their infants received lower ratings on all behaviors than did nondepressed dyads. (SKC)

Behavioral and physiological assessments of 41 seven-and-one-half-year-old children who had been selected to be inhibited or uninhibited at 21 months and observed again at four and five-and-one-half years revealed that each of the two original behavioral profiles predicted theoretically reasonable derivatives. Shy children remained shy, while…

Compared conflicts between 53 children (median age four years, three months) and their friends to conflicts between nonfriends. In comparison with conflicts among friends, conflicts between neutral associates were no less frequent, were less intense, were resolved more frequently with disengagement, and more frequently resulted in equal outcomes.…

Two studies investigated children's perceptions of how the cause of achievement outcomes affects children's emotional responses. Children aged 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, and 13 rated the reactions of children in stories to success or failure in study one, and the cause of the stories' outcomes in study two. Age differences were found in both studies. (SKC)

A two-part study examined children's conceptions of the linkages between sociomoral events and emotional consequences for several event participants. Results of the first study indicated that children's conceptions were highly differentiated. The second study found children able to match affective information to events likely to cause emotional…

Investigated the effects of caregiving experience on adults' thinking about a child-rearing problem. Study 1 found that, of 192 adults, parents were better than nonparents at diagnosing the cause of a baby's crying. Study 2 extended the first study's findings to 42 mothers and 42 nonmothers. (SKC)

Examines the relationship between class inclusion and age and indicates that class inclusion frequently appears to develop at a much later age than is suggested in Piaget's writings. (Author/MP)

Examines the strategies young children rely on prior to learning how to assign the terms top, bottom, front, and back, and the stages they go through as they master these terms. (Author/MP)