In a study of drawing development, children's and adults' drawings of cubes were classified into drawing types. Differences between children's and adults' drawings suggest that younger children use a similarity geometry with feature-based criteria, whereas older children and adults use a vantage-point geometry that includes direction-based…

In 3 studies, 2.5- and 3-year-olds transferred knowledge from an easy task that required appreciation of a symbolic relation to a more difficult task involving a symbolic relation that children their age typically do not appreciate. Results support the theory that young children use insight into one symbolic relation to understand other symbolic…

Three experiments examined 24- though 39-month-olds' understanding of pretend episodes, such as a puppet pouring pretend milk into a container and then tipping it over a toy animal. The children understood the linkage between the two actions and realized that the toy animal would become "wet." (MDM)

Eight- through 11-year-olds watched photographic slides of faces of former preschool classmates and controls, once while their skin conductance was measured and again while reporting whether or not they recognized the faces. Both verbal report and skin conductance data showed low but above-chance differentiation between children's response to…

A total of 125 7-year-old students who were poor readers were assigned to 1 of 4 experimental teaching conditions: reading with phonology, reading alone, phonology alone, or a control. Although the phonology alone group showed the most improvement on phonological tasks, the reading with phonology group made the most progress in reading…

Three experiments using the familiarization-novelty preference procedure confirmed the hypothesis that three-month-old infants could form categorical representations of spatial relations above and below. The infants, after being shown a familiarization diagram with a dot appearing in multiple locations below a line, showed a preference for a novel…

Sixty-four mother-infant pairs were videotaped during structured episodes in which the mother challenged the infant to use her instrumentally to get access to or to operate a toy. At age 6 months the infants could use their mothers instrumentally in 36% of the episodes, increasing to 67% at 9 months and 78% at 13 months. (MDM)

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from infants shown sets of familiar faces presented frequently and infrequently, and a set of novel faces presented infrequently, and correlated with infant emotional behavior and cortisol levels. Found that infants scoring higher on the normative ERP factor were more distressed during parent…

Three samples of 24- to 54-month-old children with Down's syndrome were assessed using the Ainsworth Strange Situation Procedure (ASSP) of attachment security and scored according to traditional protocols. Found that developmentally younger subjects were more difficult to classify using the standard scoring rules and that the ASSP may be measuring…

Examined the relations of emotionality and regulation to preschoolers' naturally occurring anger reactions through observations of behavior. Children's use of verbal objections to anger situations were positively related to constructive coping and attentional control, particularly for boys, and negatively related to girls' anger intensity,…

Forty-eight four-year-olds grouped in quartets of same-sex unfamiliar peers were observed during five play and activity tasks. Found that, although solitary-passive, solitary-active, and reticent behaviors were nonsignificantly intercorrelated, reticence was associated with demonstrations of anxiety and hovering near others; maternal ratings of…

Examined Swedish children's inhibition behavior using mothers' and psychologists' ratings of inhibition at age 18 and 24 months to predict later ratings through age 16 years. Prediction was more reliable for children rated as very inhibited or very uninhibited than for those in nonextreme group through age six. Only for inhibited girls did early…

Examined the developmental sequence through which adolescents progress in solving a physics problem (balance beam ratio and proportion) and a social problem (predicting the behavior of a story character). Although most of the 9- through 19-year-olds performed at predictable and similar developmental stages on each task, a minority were more…

Mothers provided personality assessments of 350 ethnically diverse 12- and 13-year-old boys using the California Child Q-set procedure to allow the development of scales to measure 5 personality dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. The resulting nomological network related these…

Seventy-seven adolescents in 2-parent families and their parents were observed in a revealed-differences interaction task when the adolescents were age 14, and the adolescents' ego development and self-esteem were assessed at both age 14 and 16. Adolescents' displays of autonomy and relatedness were strongly related to concurrent measures of ego…