Children's observation of the given-new contract was tested with a task requiring children to provide novel, rather than known, information about an event to a listener. Study 1 revealed developmental differences in children's adherence to the contract: 4- and 5-year-olds showed better adherence to the contract than 3-year-olds. In Studies 2 and…

We longitudinally investigated the development of endogenous control of attention in 2 types of tasks that involve competition for attentional focus at 7, 9, and 31 months of age. At all 3 sessions, children participated in a multiple object free play task and a distractibility task. The results revealed both developmental differences and…

In the studies presented here, infants' understanding of others' attention was assessed when gaze direction cues were not diagnostic. Fourteen-, 18- and 24-month-olds witnessed an adult look to the side of an object and express excitement. In 1 experimental condition this object was new for the adult because she was not present while the child and…

It has been proposed that infants can form global categories such as animate and inanimate objects (Mandler, 2004). The inductive generalization paradigm was used to examine inferences made by infants about the bodily, motion, and sensory capabilities of people and animals. In Experiment 1, 14-month-old infants generalized bodily and sensory…

When children learn categories, they do not learn isolated facts but rather systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge are composed of property-property (e.g., things with wings tend to have feathers), property-role (e.g., things with eyes tend to eat), and role-role (e.g., things that eat tend to sleep) correlations. Research has shown that…

Age-appropriate modifications of the A-not-B task were used to examine 2-year-olds' search behavior. Several theories predict that A-not-B errors will increase as a function of number of A trials. However, the hierarchical competing systems model (Marcovitch & Zelazo, 1999) predicts that although the ratio of perseverative to nonperseverative…

An important characteristic of mature spatial cognition is the ability to encode spatial locations in terms of relations among landmarks as well as in terms of vectors that include distance and direction. In this study, we examined children's use of the relation "middle" to code the location of a hidden toy, using a procedure adapted from prior…

Relational similarity connects superficially dissimilar objects and events. In 2 experiments, the ability to recognize and respond to similar relations was studied in children ages 3 to 5 with 2 comparison tasks. Children interpreted illustrated pictures that shared perceptual or relational aspects and then made 2 comparison choices and…

This study investigated the development of the understanding of class inclusion in children age 5, 7, and 9 years, whose performance on a qualitative class-inference task assessing their appreciation of the transitive and asymmetrical nature of inclusive relations within the animal domain was compared with their ability to make quantitative…

Forgetting is frustrating, usually because it is unintended. Other times, one may purposely attempt to forget an event. A global theory of recognition and free recall that explains both types of forgetting and remembering from multiple list experiments is presented. The critical assumption of the model is that both intentional and unintentional…

The independent cue technique has been developed to test traditional interference theories against inhibition theories of forgetting. In the present study, the authors tested the critical criterion for the independence of independent cues: Studied cues not presented during test (and unrelated to test cues) should not contribute to the retrieval…

Despite the fact that categories are often composed of correlated features, the evidence that people detect and use these correlations during intentional category learning has been overwhelmingly negative to date. Nonetheless, on other categorization tasks, such as feature prediction, people show evidence of correlational sensitivity. A…

How to best measure working memory capacity is an issue of ongoing debate. Besides established complex span tasks, which combine short-term memory demands with generally unrelated secondary tasks, there exists a set of paradigms characterized by continuous and simultaneous updating of several items in working memory, such as the n-back, memory…

In almost all daily activities fingers of both hands are used in coordinated succession. The present experiments explored whether learning in such tasks pertains not only to the overall sequence spanning both hands but also to the constituent sequences of each hand. In a serial reaction time task, 2 repeating hand-related sequences were…

The cognitive processes underlying quantitative estimations vary. Past research has identified task-contingent changes between rule-based and exemplar-based processes (P. Juslin, L. Karlsson, & H. Olsson, 2008). B. von Helversen and J. Rieskamp (2008), however, proposed a simple rule-based model--the mapping model--that outperformed the exemplar…