Finds that seven-month-old infants are sensitive to pictorial interposition whereas five-month-old infants are not. Suggests that sensitivity to pictorial depth information first appears between five and seven months of age. (Author)

Reports that lengthy interstimulus interval facilitates classical conditioning in very young infants. Infants trained in a single session at 20 days of age exhibited reliable retention of the conditioned eyelid reflex 10 days later, but infants 10 days of age did not. (Author)

Reports experiments on the symbolic distance effect and related phenomena with six- and nine-year-old children. The effect was obtained for lexical and pictorial input; pictures produced faster responses than words; congruity effects occurred in the pictorial condition. Asymmetry in subjects' capacity to verify statements of relation was found,…

A total of 60 children four-, five-, and six-years-old were assigned to memory or control groups and told they could play with toys. Mnemonic mediators were identified on the basis of differences in the behavior of children given memory and play instructions. Use of mnemonic mediators differentiated groups at all ages and increased with age. (RH)

In three experiments, the effect of additional "contextual" elements on the discrimination of the orientation of linear and curvilinear segments was investigated with four-month-old infants. Results suggest that, regarding certain stimuli and techniques of measurement, surrounding contextual segments can aid the discrimination of linear and…

Studies two groups of autistic children--good versus poor verbal imitators--within the context of a receptive label acquisition task. Both groups acquired receptive signs. However, good imitators acquired receptive speech whereas poor imitators typically did not. (Author/AS)

Investigates the applicability of the self-as-schema model to children and examines the extent of negative self-schemas in relatively depressed children among 61 elementary school students; most of the students were between 8 and 12 years old. Results were consistent with the self-as-schema hypotheses, and mood congruent content-specific recall…

A set of studies examined infant categorization of the orientation of visual stimuli by establishing a categorization function for the orientation continuum; attempted to determine a perceptual boundary between "oblique" and "vertical"; and explored the relationship between discrimination abilities and the perceptual boundary. These phenomena were…

Experiments assessed free recall performance as a function of lag across a broad range of elementary school students in grades one, three, and six and tested the hypothesis that repeating an item facilitated memory performance to the extent that each repetition was encoded differently, thus creating more ways to retrieve. (RH)

Investigates the effect of presentation context, taxonomy, and age of child on mothers' choices of category names in object-naming tasks. Contextual factors had a primary role in determining mothers' selections of category names, and the three independent variables had a complex and dynamic effect on mothers' naming practices. (Author/CI)

Proposes that component units of prediction hypotheses are acquired independently and at different rates by the young child. On the basis of a combination of learning-set and blank-trial evaluations of children's conceptions, finds that young children exhibit response patterns corresponding to hypotheses in most of their probes. (Author/CI)

Investigates the effects of schematic and categorical organization on young children's recall of a taxonomic list or a story in an alternate or a successive condition. Preschool children's story recall was well organized, but their list recall was poorly organized. Kindergarten children's recall of both the story and the list was well organized.…

Investigates developmental change in the use of strategies to eliminate interference from irrelevant information in memory. Two developmental transitions were found: (1) from ineffective to effective selective remembering (between ages 7 and 11), and (2) from the use of a selective retrieval strategy to a more sophisticated rehearsal strategy…

Reversal and nonreversal shifts in 19 2- to 14-year-old autistic children were studied. Results indicated that the older autistic children did better on reversal shifts than did younger children, who performed better on nonreversal shifts. Findings were consistent with those for normal children. (Author)

Studies 58 children ages eight to nine years who were classified as good and poor readers on the basis of their proofreading two passages varying in level of difficulty. Misspellings were introduced by transposing two adjacent letters in the word "the," other three-letter words, and longer words. (Author/CI)