Explored the construction of mathematical proofs through a hidden figure task and a variant of "Mastermind" game with children ages 7-12 years old. Older children were better able to distinguish necessary moves and to recognize sufficient evidence. Modifying the original hidden figure task to reduce its information-processing demands improved…

Two studies examined short- and long-term effects of phonological awareness training on reading and spelling of German kindergartners. Found no long-term effects on reading and spelling skills beyond first year of elementary school. Determined that training affected phonological awareness skills but not phonological processing, letter knowledge,…

Tested a conceptual model of parenting to determine whether maternal child-centered perspectives mediated relations between parenting resources of social support, child-rearing history, and self-esteem and the child's developmental level with parenting behavior. Found that mothers' perspectives directly related to parenting behavior in two…

Examined role of linguistic demarcation of numerals on cognitive representations of numbers with Caucasian children, 5-7 years old. Theorized that the linguistic paradigm does not always support the idea that language affects number concepts and that children's performance is shaped by other constraints. Results suggest that the task reflects…

Examined 4-, 6- and 8-year-old children's recency and frequency judgments, using drawings of common objects. Found accuracy of recency and frequency judgments improved between 4 and 6 years of age. Found no evidence that children in any age-group based their recency judgments on trace-strength information in episodic recall; found some evidence…

Three studies examined the ability of 8- and 9-year-olds and young adults to use sample monotonicity and diversity information according to the similarity-coverage model of category-based induction. Found that children's difficulty with this information was independent of category level, and may be based on preferences for other strategies…

Three experiments examined whether newborns are sensitive to an operant-conditioning task involving unprepared relation between a response and a stimuli. Found that newborns tested under the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure were involved in an operant-learning situation, in that an increase in sucking rates could be obtained after an auditory…

Forty second-graders, 20 good and 20 poor readers, completed a /ba/-/da/ temporal order judgment (TOJ) task. The groups did not differ in TOJ when /ba/ and /da/ were paired with more easily discriminated syllables. Poor readers' difficulties with /ba/-/da/ reflected perceptual confusion between phonetically similar syllables rather than difficulty…

Two experiments investigated the role of distractor characteristics and type of object-directed attention on 7- and 10-month-old infants' distraction latencies during object exploration. Found that infants took longer to turn toward distractors during focused object-directed attention than when engaged in more casual attention. They exhibited…

Covert visual orienting was measured in 13 twelve-year-old and 11 fifteen-year-old hockey players and in 13 college students with no hockey training. Found that high-skill 15-year-olds were better able than all other groups to take advantage of the general alerting effect produced by the sudden onset of a cue. (MDM)

Three studies found that 3- to 5-year-olds judged that an utterance would be ignored by a listener who had previously seen something contradictory. However, children judged that the listener would believe an utterance if the listener had no contradictory information. The results suggest an early understanding of how people prioritize information.…

Elementary and college students completed a cued intentional forgetting task, either a direct or indirect test of word recall, and a final free recall test for both remember- and forget-cued words. In both groups, performance on word-stem completion tasks was enhanced in comparison with an immediate free-recall group, but only for material thought…

In a study of developmental differences in ability to suppress irrelevant information in working memory, children and adults provided endings for sentences that constrained a terminal noun. Responses to critical sentences were disconfirmed with unexpected endings. On another sentence-completion task with disconfirmed nouns, children showed priming…

Studied transfer of rule knowledge in 7- to 9-year-old normal and disabled readers. Compared performance on trained exemplars and untrained transfer items by means of posttests following rule training. Found that normal readers transferred rule knowledge in reading and music tasks; disabled readers were proficient only on music tasks and showed…

Examined evidence for transitions in first and second graders' analogical reasoning, over a six-month period. Found strong evidence for bimodality in test performance frequency distributions and weaker evidence for inaccessibility in frequency distributions. Transitional subjects showed a temporary increase of inconsistent solution behavior and…