Investigated the assumption that different aspects of visual selectivity depend on common processing resources by engaging observers aged 5, 7, 9, and 24 years in a task designed to examine the relations between covert shifts of attention and filtering. Covert orienting and filtering shared processing resources; filtering ability improved with…

Suggested that strategy choices for solving addition problems were related to numerical and spatial ability domains, while the speed of executing the component process of fact retrieval was related to arithmetic ability only. Findings supported the convergent validity of the strategy choice model and its discriminant validity. (RH)

Findings on 20 children who passed an area conservation task and 20 who didn't suggested that conserving children applied an additive rule, while nonconserving children presented patterns suggesting centration on one of the two dimensions. Implications for Anderson's and Piaget's conceptions of conservation development are discussed. (RH)

Infants: (1) demonstrated memory for four events and the robustness of memory after a one week delay; (2) showed ability to anticipate upcoming events during training; (3) increased anticipatory behaviors during later training trials; and (4) appeared to form expectancies of future events during periods of stimulus onset and offset. (RH)

To test predictions regarding the attentional capacity requirements of Piaget's stage of concrete operations, a battery of concrete operational tasks and two measures of attentional capacity were administered to 120 first-, second-, and third-graders. Findings concern class inclusion, transitivity of length and weight, and multiplication of…

Children as young as 24 months were able to recall accurate information about a series of unusual events after a 3-month delay. Recall of the events after a relatively brief interval appeared to act as a deterrent against forgetting over a longer interval. (RH)

Results of five experiments showed that in certain situations recall varied with processing difficulty for both children and college students. This was primarily due to enhanced cue discriminability. The relation between processing difficulty and developmental increases in recall seemed to be mediated by constructability problems and resource- and…

Two-year-olds discriminated two original training stimuli nearly perfectly, thereby showing that some form of controlling stimulus-response relation had been established. Most children's generalization gradients had little or no slope. Results are not consistent with earlier generalization data from young children. (RH)

Preferences for moving versus static bars were assessed in 8-, 16-, and 20-week-old infants. Findings revealed that at both 16 and 20 weeks, preferences were affected only by the velocity of the bar's movement. This effect persisted at 20 weeks even when static reference features were added to the display. (RH)

Reports two experiments in which plain blocks of various sizes were presented in various spatial orientations to children three-eight years old in an attempt to establish how they represent three-dimensional spatial relations pictorially. Results showed that young children represented depth in the array vertically in the picture plane. (RH)

Examined potential central processing strategy differences among subgroups of children on a series of elaborative encoding tasks. Children in lower verbal and learning ability subgroups differed from those in higher ability groups in how they shared, discriminated, and selectively allocated resources between recall tasks. (RH)

Findings indicated that: (1) 10- and 13-year-olds had difficulty accepting contrary-to-fact premises as a basis for reasoning; (2) 15- and 18-year-olds found reasoning correctly more difficult with contrary-to-fact premises; and (3) among 5- and 7-year-olds, a fantasy context decreased the extent to which empirical knowledge interfered with…

Contrasted four theories of natural language category acquisition by investigating the relation between category intensions and extensions in kindergarten children, second and fifth graders, and college students. Since none of the theories discussed could explain the pattern of results, an exemplar-based model was proposed. (RH)

A study was conducted to isolate monitoring of test performance from other forms of monitoring and determine the effect of taking a test on expectations about performance. Results were consistent with claims that developmental changes in self-regulation could be tied to developmental changes in monitoring of performance and predicting performance.…

Documents cognitive processes mediating the observational learning of conservation. Findings suggest the presence of demand characteristics for high undifferentiated ratings under a public format of certainty appraisal. This contamination prevents valid monitoring of the course of cognitive rule processing. (RH)