Examined young children's understanding of seed origins and growth preconditions and the stages of plant growth. Found that, by 4.5 years, children realized that natural causal mechanisms underlie plant growth and appreciated the relationship of seeds to plants. Results suggest that preschoolers hold theory-like understandings of plants similar to…

Infants were trained to kick their feet into a crib mobile and tested two weeks later. Found that presentation of a moving, but not a stationary, mobile in a reminder treatment 24 hours before testing alleviated forgetting in the test and that, in the test, memory of the kicking activity was specific to the conditions of the original training. (BC)

Critically reviews literature relevant to the hypothesis that a major X-linked gene determines spatial ability in man. It is concluded that belief in the validity of the hypothesis is unfounded. (Author/SS)

Identifies and reviews the evidence for some potential functions of proximity seeking in infancy. Data pertaining to a variety of species are reviewed. (Author/SS)

Four experiments were conducted to investigate the development of visual accommodation in one- to three-month-old infants. Accommodation responses and pupil diameters were measured at various stimulus distances. Results suggest that changes in depth of focus in the first three months are largely responsible for growth in accommodation. (Author/SS)

Tests Piaget's assertion that the anticipation of conservation among otherwise nonconserving children is a pseudoconservation since it is limited to those lacking knowledge of covariation. Number, area, and length conservation tasks and a covariation task were given to 96 children from kindergarten through the fifth grade. (Author/SS)

The classifying behavior of five-year-old children and adults was examined in two studies of restricted classification using triads of stimuli composed of the dimensions of length and density. Results were consistent with the notion of separable perception for adults and integral perception for children. (Author/SS)

Tests the hypotheses that superiority of semantic over phonetic encoding increases with age, and that the superiority of multiple-dimension encoding over single-dimension encoding emerges with age. Elementary, secondary, and graduate students judged words on various dimensions of the semantic differential in an incidental memory task. (Author/SS)

The ability of three- and four-year-old children to reason about the components of event sequences involving simple transformations was tested in two experiments. In Experiment I children saw picture "stories" of the form object, instrument, and transformed object, with one item deleted. In Experiment II only the instrument item was deleted.…

Tested the persistence over 24 hours of reward-expectation habits in infants. A comparison was made between the responses of two groups of infants (infants with a history of reinforcement with large, complex mobiles, and infants with no prior history of reinforcement with mobiles) on a task reinforced by a small mobile. (Author/SS)

Examines the relative utility of exemplar and linguistic information for acquiring basic and superordinate categories. Developmental differences were predicted in the ability to benefit from the linguistically specified information. Preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children were tested. (Author/SS)

Examines life-span developmental differences in spontaneous integration of semantically relevant material presented in pictures and sentences. Elementary school students, high school students, and adults were tested. (Author/SS)

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of varying the amount of preceding-sentence context upon the lexical decision speed of third- and sixth-grade and college-level students. (Author/MP)

Examines whether the relationship between mothers' ratings on the Neonatal Perception Inventory of their one-month-old infants and social-emotional development at 4 1/2 years as reported for a Pittsburgh population could be demonstrated in a Seattle population. (MP)

A battery of four tasks which measure the interhemispheric transfer of information was utilized to test the hypothesis that there will be an increase in efficiency of interhemispheric transfer with increasing age. (MP)