Children build up knowledge about the world and also remember individual episodes. How individual episodes during which children learn new things become integrated with one another to form general knowledge is only beginning to be explored. Integration between separate episodes is called on in educational contexts and in everyday life as a major…

Adults and children (5- and 8-year-olds) performed a temporal bisection task with either auditory or visual signals and either a short (0.5-1.0s) or long (4.0-8.0s) duration range. Their working memory and attentional capacities were assessed by a series of neuropsychological tests administered in both the auditory and visual modalities. Results…

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall…

Children with mathematics difficulties suffer from working memory deficits. This study investigated the deficit profile of phonological storage and executive functions in working memory among children with mathematics difficulties. Based on multiple instruments and two assessment points, 68 children were screened out of 805 fifth graders. Of these…

We investigated how preschoolers use their understanding of the actions available to a speaker to resolve referential ambiguity. In this study, 58 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with arrays of eight objects in a toy house and were instructed to retrieve various objects from the display. The trials varied in terms of whether the speaker's hands…

Research suggests that emotions influence children's ability to discern fantasy from reality; however, reasons for this association remain unknown. The current research sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying children's distinctions by examining the roles discrete emotions and context have in 3- to 5-year-olds' evaluations of fantasy…

The current research investigated the organization of children's face space by examining whether 5- and 8-year-olds show race-contingent aftereffects. Participants read a storybook in which Caucasian and Chinese children's faces were distorted in opposite directions. Before and after adaptation, participants judged the normality/attractiveness of…

Methods of increasing learning efficiency through a blocking technique were examined in young children. (Author/SB)

In an attempt to assess the status of the object concept, visual fixation and cardiac deceleration were recorded for 36 infants, 20-24 weeks old, during three kinds of events in which objects moving on a linear trajectory were temporarily occluded by a screen: (1) a familiar object appeared on both sides of the screen; (2) a novel object appeared…

Tested whether a verbal description given before or after presentation of a picture effected visual processing and/or memory. (SB)

A discrimination reversal problem was presented to 192 children varying in age from 3 to 5 years. At the end of both the initial learning and transfer trials, probe trials were introduced to ascertain the response rule describing children's choices. (Author/SB)

Kindergarteners and second-graders were shown pairs of pictures, one picture at a time, and asked to name each picture as rapidly and as accurately as possible. Pictures pairs were of four types which reflected the factorial combination of associative relatedness (high and low) with categorial relatedness (high and low). (SB)

A sorting presentation procedure was used to study the effects of three classification schemes (self-generated, thematic, or taxonomic) on the organized free recall of second and fifth graders. (Author/SB)

The use of A', a nonparametic measure of sensitivity in tests of recognition memory, is discussed. In particular, two formulas for computing A' are considered. (Author/SB)

Visual pattern preferences were established for 96 9- and 13-week-old infants using stimuli varying in contour density presented either at a low, moderate, or high luminance level. Age differences in the maximally preferred patterns across stimuli and luminance levels indicated that luminance interacts with contour density in determining stimulus…