Examined age and gender differences regarding the nature, meaning, and function of cherished possessions. Among the significant differences found were that younger children were egocentric in meanings assigned to cherished possessions, whereas older children held social relationships meaningful; females favored items to be contemplated, while…

The cues that reactivate forgotten memories of young infants are highly specific. Three experiments examined whether this specificity decreases over repeated reactivations. Results confirm that different memory attributes become inaccessible at different rates and that repeatedly retrieved and older memories are less likely to be less detailed.…

Dual task procedures--elaborative strategy use and finger tapping--were used to examine both recall and mental effort demands of elaboration strategy use among second and third graders. Results indicated that boys and girls did not differ in recall of arbitrarily paired items, but for feminine pairs, girls recalled more than boys; for masculine…

Two experiments with children five and eight years of age examined the effects of different types of similarity on analogical problem solving and explored the cognitive components responsible for these effects. Results indicated that superficial and structural similarity facilitated the process of drawing analogies. (WJC)

Presented a battery of false belief tasks varying in type of belief questioned, target for belief ascription, presentation of reality information, and deception context to Head Start children. Found that performance was better on locations tasks than on contents tasks and with older children compared with younger children and that performance was…

Four- to 11-year-olds made duration, distance, and speed judgments on Piagetian tasks where cars ran on parallel tracks. Among younger children, duration and distance judgments had approximately the same difficulty. Among older children, distance judgments were easier than duration judgments, and symmetry of effects of temporal and spatial…

Compared spelling procedures of normal and reading-disabled French-speaking children matched for reading achievement. Found that, at the lowest reading level, word frequency effects were absent and phonological context effects on rule application were seen only in normal readers. As reading ability improved, word frequency and phonological context…

Three preschoolers performed four sorts with stimulus cards--an untaught target sort and three directly taught alternating sorts considered to self-instruct the target performance. Accuracy increased first in the skill sorts and then in the untaught target sorts. All subjects generalized to new target sorts. Correct spontaneous self-instructions…

Examined whether writing and working memory (WM) were related to general or process-specific system, whether WM tasks operated independently of phonological short-term memory (STM), and whether WM predicted writing variance beyond that predicted by reading. Found a four-factor model reflecting phonological STM, verbal WM span, executive…

Compared effects of syntactic context and attention on identifying masked spoken words in reading-disabled seventh graders and good readers. Found that, in both groups, syntactic structure of context triggers a process of anticipation for particular syntactic categories based on an assumption that linguistic messages are syntactically coherent;…

Two studies examined six-year-olds' use of analogy in spelling: between visible clue words and similar sounding target words and when clue words are not visible. Both studies found that equal numbers of analogies were made between words sharing a rime unit, a consonant-vowel, or a vowel but were not made when only common letters were shared. (KDFB)

Compared male and female four-year-olds' performance on a kinesthetic acuity test (KAT) with or without extra visual-spatial cues and on a measure of visual-spatial ability. Found that all children performed better on the KAT with extra cues and that boys scored higher on visual-spatial ability and performed better on the KAT only with extra cues.…

Two experiments studied the impact of the nature of information available at different processing levels on differences in haptic (tactile) and in visual, free classification development. Found that exploration characteristics (involving simultaneous versus independent processing of stimulus dimensions) and presentation of the stimulus dimensions…

Two experiments showed two-year-olds pairs of videotaped actions, one familiar and one novel, and asked them to select referents of novel verbs. For actions not involving objects, children tended to select the novel action over the familiar one in each of four experiments. For actions involving objects, novel actions were chosen more often than…

Three studies used computer graphics and/or verbal questioning to examine beliefs among children and adults that vision involves input to the eyes (intromission) or emissions from the eye (extramission). Results showed decreases in extramission and increases in intromission beliefs across age. There were more extramission interpretations with…