Fourier analyses of children's behaviors were conducted over a sequence of five consecutive study/recall trials to identify temporal patterns. Findings pointed to a global strategy in which children learn the items' categories before learning them individually. There was little qualitative difference in temporal organization for second graders and…

Three experiments examined infants' processing of three-dimensional (3D) information in static images. Results indicated that 3-month olds are sensitive to 3D cues in static images. However, discrepancies based on these cues may not engage infants' attention like those based on fundamental features. (Author)

Investigated what makes young children acknowledge a false belief held by another person. Showed movies in which a stereotypical item in a familiar box was replaced by one character with an atypical item. Found highly significant improvement in preschoolers' acknowledgment of second character's false belief when preschoolers saw stereotypical…

Adults, 9-year olds, and 5-year olds were shown horizontal and vertical lines of various sizes, presented on same wall or different walls, and asked to estimate corresponding area. Responses indicated that when width and height were separated, children gave same weight to both dimensions while adults gave greater weight to larger dimensions; when…

Investigated mechanisms underlying age-related differences in information processing for production of motor responses, especially development of feedforward mechanisms. Studied 6-, 8-, 10-, and 22-year olds under two conditions: without advance information on movement to be made, and with advanced information on movement. Found beyond 6 years of…

Investigated understanding of place value in 93 English-speaking and 50 Japanese-speaking children with cubes denoting units and tens for representation of multi-digit numbers. Found that differences between English and Japanese participants disappeared when use of tens cubes was demonstrated in practice trials. Results suggest that influence of…

Assessed how attention toward a visual model affects children's production of visually realistic drawings. Found that spontaneous increase in attention toward models accompanied progression from intellectual to visual realism and that drawing performance of younger children was enhanced by contrasting tasks and explicit instructions. For all, use…

Reinvestigated claim that beginning readers exploit information from orthographic rime of clue words to help them decode unfamiliar words. Among the findings: children were able to use orthographic information from beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar words, with clue word presentation enhancing the reading of…

Hypothesized: (1) phonological mediation is primary process in acquisition of French reading and spelling skills; and (2) it may allow construction of orthographic lexicon. Tests partially supported first hypothesis, with contradictory finding of facilitative effect of analogy for reading. Second hypothesis was supported; also found that children…

Four experiments examined exogenous orienting in 3.5-month-olds. Found that sensitivity to a small moving bar was lower when most of the red bars were in the visual field contra-lateral to this probe. The distribution of color within the visual field biased attention, making it either more or less likely that the infant detected a moving stimulus.…

Analyzed postural oscillations in six-, eight-, and 10-year-olds in four visual and two somatosensory conditions. Found that children were more stable with than without vision and more stable with a normal than with an altered support surface. Overall, there was no effect of age. The relative influence of peripheral and central vision on postural…

Examined relationship between anxiety and memory in 160 high- and low-trait-anxious sixth through eighth graders. Found that anxiety predicted memory bias toward negative relative to neutral information during conceptual but not perceptual tasks. Anxiety predicted memory bias toward positive relative to neutral information on procedural tasks and…

Studied time estimation for a button-pressing response in 3- and 5.5-year-olds under "minimal,""temporal," and "force" instructions. Found that force--but not temporal--instructions improved 3-year-olds' timing accuracy. When instructed to press harder, they pressed longer. Older children were more accurate with temporal than with force…

Investigated simultaneous occurrence of emergent stimulus-response relations (functional equivalence) and stimulus-stimulus relations (stimulus equivalence). Trained 4- and 5-year olds to emit specified responses to pairs of stimuli in one setting (original training) and to emit other responses to one member of each pair in another setting…

Used picture-naming task to identify accurate/inaccurate phonological representations by dyslexic and control children; compared performance on phonological measures for words with precise/imprecise representations. Found that frequency effects in phonological tasks disappeared after considering representational quality, and that availability of…