Examined the effects of negative majority-culture stereotypes of race on elementary school-age African American children's intraracial attitudes. Found that children showed better memory for stereotypic than counterstereotypic information about skin tone. Individual differences in this memory bias varied according to the children's endorsement of…

Assessed the relationship of attachment status to autobiographical memory in preschoolers. Found that mother-child dyads with insecurely attached daughters engaged in relatively more negative memory talk than those with securely attached daughters. Secure-daughter dyads elaborated more on emotional themes than insecure-daughter dyads. Relations…

Compared rate of conflict, conflict resolution, and the appearance of reflection on emotions and literate language in friend and nonfriend dyads of kindergarten children. Found that, although rates of conflicts were similar, friends resolved conflicts more frequently than nonfriends and generated more emotional and literate language. Support was…

An object-retrieval study tested the hypothesis that locating a caregiver would interfere with false belief performance and be related to preschool children's emotional awareness. Results showed age-related improvement to above-chance levels during object identity and location tasks, but caregiver location task performance showed no age-related…

Children, ages 3 and 5, examined a "sick" teddy bear. Interviews with real props, toy props, or verbal prompts were conducted three days and one year later. After three days, real items and toys facilitated memory compared to verbal prompts, but reports with toys were less accurate than both. After one year, real items still helped accuracy but…

Examined awareness of the causal relation between strategy use and recall performance among preschoolers, first graders, and third graders, and the relation of this awareness to children's study behavior and recall. Found age-related differences in awareness, with children who understood this relationship more likely to give mentalistic…

Investigated mechanisms underlying reductions in susceptibility to interference from irrelevant information that are evident in the developing child. Used two experiments requiring attention to one stimulus out of many. Found that age changes in selective attention are mediated to an important extent by changes in the speed and efficiency of…

Compared immediate ordered memory for words in poor readers and normal readers. Items (manipulated in word length and phonological similarity) were presented either auditorily or visually. Results suggested that phonological coding and rehearsal occur to the same extent in poor and normal readers with both presentations, but absolute performance…

Followed beginning readers to examine phonological skill influences. Found segmentation strongly correlated with attainment in reading and spelling at end of first year. Also found that letter name knowledge predicted both reading and spelling skill and showed interactive effect with segmentation. Finally, found that by end of second year, rhyming…

Tested hypothesis from Bahrick and Pickens' infant attention model that retrieval cues increase memory accessibility and shift visual preferences toward greater novelty to resemble recent memories. Found that after retention intervals associated with remote or intermediate memory, previous familiarity preferences shifted to null or novelty…

Two experiments investigated extent to which English- and German-speaking childrens' mental arithmetic was constrained by working memory. Found higher mental addition spans when numbers were visible throughout calculation than when not. Variation in addition span with age and arithmetical operation difficulty approximated to a linear function of…

Examined effect of negative affect of parents and peers on young children's affective responses, cognitive appraisals, and coping strategies. Found that compared to peer negative affect, children felt they could do little to help themselves when faced with paternal distress and frequently indicated they would use avoidant coping strategies to feel…

Examined performance of over one hundred 6- to 10-year olds on three of each of the following tasks: processing speed, memory span, phonological skill, and articulation tasks assessing speed with which they could say familiar stimuli. Found that performance on span tasks was predicted by phonology and articulation tasks but not by age or…

Four experiments examined effects of the number of features and feature relations on learning and long-term memory in 3-month olds. Findings suggested that memory load size selectively constrained infants' long-term memory for relational information, suggesting that in infants, features and relations are psychologically distinct and that memory…

Three studies investigated the analogical reasoning of 127 children in a physics task using an analogy generated by the children. Found that 9- to 10-year olds showed spontaneous transfer in both negative and positive analogy training conditions, while 7-year olds showed no transfer in the positive analogy condition but transferred only selected…