The role of action lines in children's memory for pictures

The purpose of the present study was to test the hypothesis that memory for pictorial material is dependent on initial comprehension of the depicted relationships. Subjects at three age levels (second, sixth, and ninth grades) were compared on ability to remember cartoon pictures which did or did not contain action lines as clues to the interaction between actors. It was predicted that the older children, because of extensive experience with still cartoons and comics, would benefit from the action lines. The action lines facilitated recall of pictures for only the older students, specifically, the ninth graders. The object of the action was the most efficient probe, even though the action was more frequently remembered. These results are discussed in terms of the action (interaction) being the basis of comprehension and, consequently, the remembering of the picture.     

Thematic elaboration and proximity in childrens recall, organization, and long-term retention of pictorial materials.

Preschool and fifth-grade children were asked to learn and recall lists of nine pictures of common objects in which the thematic relationship and the physical proximity of subsets of items were varied. Five presentation conditions (lists) were employed: (1) subgroups of three items simultaneously presented with an explicit theme, (2) the same items as in (1) but randomly arranged in the subset, (3) unrelated items presented simultaneously in groups of three, (4) nine items presented successively but temporally blocked in subgroups of three, and (5) nine items displayed successively in a random arrangement. Recall and clustering scores indicated that the older children spontaneously elaborated pictures when subsets of items were presented simultaneously and when these items formed a natural theme. The preschool children failed to elaborate, responding more on the basis of the proximity of the items. Proximity was a potent recall cue for both age groups. Long-term tests, carried out after one week, showed good retention, the output organization of which closely paralleled that observed during original learning.     

Mediation and production deficiencies in children's judgments of morality

This study investigated the influence of intentions and consequences on moral judgments. Children's and adults' production of inferences about an actor's intentions was assessed separately from their use of intentions as mediators of moral judgments. Two hundred and sixteen kindergarten, fourth grade and adult subjects viewed one of four videotaped episodes in which an actor either intentionally or accidentally produced a positive or negative result. Participants received one of two prompts to produce inferences about the actor's intentions or received no prompt. Each subject rated the actor's intent and the good-ness-badness of the actor. Results supported a mediational deficiency explanation for children's objective moral judgments. Both 6- and 10-year-old children made reliable, adult-like inferences of intentions. However, children's moral evaluations were based primarily on objective consequences while adults' evaluations were based primarily on the intentions of the actor. Young children did have intentionality information available, yet even with prompting this information did not mediate their judgments in an adult-like way; suggesting that there may be a period in development during which the child understands and produces subjective inferences but does not use this information as a basis for moral judgments.     

Levels of processing, encoding strategies, and memory development.

In three experiments, memory for intentionally encoded words was compared with memory for encodings induced by asking semantic, phonemic, or surface questions. Subjects were second-, fourth-, and sixth-grade, and junior and senior high school students. Semantic encodings were more often recalled and recognized than were phonemic and surface (which did not differ). Intentional encodings were as likely to be recalled as semantic but were no more likely than phonemic and surface to be recognized, and this was true whether intentional learning was in anticipation of a recall test or a recognition test. Age trends occurred for recall, for intentional learning, and for induced processing which required subjects to generate word attributes. Age trends were attenuated for recognition and for induced processing which required subjects to verify whether a give attribute applied to the target word.     

Memory scanning by children: Meaningfulness and mediation

Two experiments were performed for the purpose of isolating factors that influence speed of memory scanning by children. The first experiment revealed an interaction involving age and type of stimulus. Young children required relatively greater time to process ambiguous stimuli. The second experiment, involving a pretraining phase designed to induce mediation, showed that preschool children scan representations more rapidly when given instructions to apply a mediator.     

The structure of infant intelligence: An historical overview

An historical overview of investigations that were concerned with delineating the structure and composition of infant intellectual activity is presented. The events which both preceded and culminated in the conceptualization of infant intelligence as a unitary trait, or factor, are traced. Thereafter, recent studies are reviewed which have guided contemporary investigators to contend that infant intellectual activity is comprised of varied sets of relatively independent abilities and factors. Several conclusions are made concerning the points of view which various investigators have held regarding the structure of infant intelligence.     

Predicting career performance of physicians using the biographical inventory approach

Two critical problems face professional and technical schools and their admissions committees: (1) the criterion problem of defining what constitutes a “good” career practitioner, and (2) the predictor problem of assessing in advance which applicants to the various schools are most likely to become these “good” career practitioners (and not just good students). The present project, working with a 333 physician sample, was designed to establish such criteria and predictors in the field of medicine. Seven important composite and summary criteria were established and five of them were successfully predicted with cross-validities at levels beyond .40 and ranging as high as .56 by a 351-item biographical inventory. A triplecross validation item-analysis design was used.     

Operant theory and methodology in infant vocal conditioning

The numerous mechanisms of behavior change in infant development are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Although it is agreed that elicitation and reinforcement both influence infant learning, the distinction between these two learning mechanisms was clarified in response to K. Bloom's (1984, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 38, 93-102) commentary. The theoretical and methodological assumptions of an functional analysis of infant behavior were made explicit in the context of the C. L. Poulson study (1983, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 36, 471-489). The rationale for the use of DRO schedules to control for elicitation effects of continuous reinforcement and the inadequacy of noncontingent schedules for this purpose were also discussed.     

A comparison of the environments of day care centers and group day care homes for 3 year olds

Caregiver-child interaction and social participation were compared in community-based day care centers and group day care homes for three year olds. Use of group day care homes made it possible to control for group size and adult-child ratio. Day care homes were found to be more structured in terms of curriculum, and more flexible in terms of overall schedule and social-emotional climate. Adult child interaction was of higher quality during structured periods in day care homes. Social participation was of higher quality in day care homes. The adult-child interaction in both types of day care was impersonal and neutral in affective tone.     

Decision processes in children's recognition memory

Kindergarteners and third graders were given a continuous recognition memory task involving two-digit numbers. In addition, a rating scale consisting of photographs of various facial expressions was used to obtain confidence judgments from the Ss. Conventional analyses as well as signal detection analyses of the data revealed the following results: (a) the overall performance of the third graders was superior to that of the kindergarteners; (b) memory strength decreased as the number of intervening items increased; (c) there was no difference in the forgetting rates of the two grade levels; (d) the third graders exhibited a more liberal response bias than the kindergarteners; (e) both the hit rate (probability of correctly labeling an old stimulus as old) and the false-alarm rate (probability of incorrectly labeling a new stimulus as old) increased across blocks of items; (f) the increases in the hit rate and the false-alarm rate over blocks were due to a change in criterion from a relatively conservative level to a more lenient one; (g) the lower the S's level of confidence in judging an item as old, the lower was the probability of that item actually being old; (h) the third graders were better than the kindergarteners at gauging the accuracy of their recognition responses. It was concluded that with respect to recognition memory, chidren as young as $\text{5}\text{1}\text{2}$ years old are capable, to some extent, of monitoring their own memory states.     

Memory scanning of shapes,colors, and compounds: A comparison of retarded and nonretarded adults

Three experiments were performed to assess memory scanning of shapes, colors, and shape-color compounds by retarded and nonretarded people. Attributes comprising compounds provided either redundant or nonredundant information. Large retarded-nonretarded differences in reaction time were obtained. In contrast to previous reports of slow scanning of digits and nonsense shapes by retarded people, scan rates for shapes and colors did not differ between groups. Retarded subjects were not characterized by a deficient scan rate. Although compound stimuli required twice as many attributes in their repersentation as did simple stimuli, they were not scanned more slowly, indicating that per item scan rate is not determined by the number of attributes required to define each item. Both groups were able to exploit redundant relevant information to achieve faster processing than in simple conditions. Decision rules for rejecting compound stimuli comprised one, two, or more binary tests. Groups did not differ in speed of performing elementary binary test(s).     

Facilitative effects of forgetting from short-term memory on growth of long-term memory in retardates

Competing explanations of the beneficial effect of spacing in retardate discrimination learning were tested. Three-trial multidimensional (“junk”) problems were presented concurrently to educable retardates with MAs over 8 years. The spacing interval spearating Trials 1 and 2 was filled with either zero, four, or eight interpolations, the interpolations being either trials on similar junk problems or repetitions of a single, well-learned dot-pattern discrimination. The principal findings were that: (1) while short-term retention of junk problems (as measured by Trial 2 performance) suffered greater interference from similar junk interpolations than from dot-pattern interpolations, long-term learning (as measured by a delayed Trial 3) was superior following the highly interfering junk problems; and (2) spacing facilitated learning only following highly interfering interpolations. These results are inconsistent with consolidation and rehearsal theories but support the prediction of the Sperber. Greenfield, and House (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1973, 99) spacing model that forgetting from short-term memory facilitates retardate learning.     

Analysis of the development of children's spatial reference systems

Four, six, and ten-year-old children were required to copy an object's location and orientation within a two-dimensional spatial layout under two conditions: when both E's standard board and that of the S's were in the same orientation and when they were rotated 180 ° from each other. The failure of the 4-yr-olds to copy location and orientation under both conditions even when space was topographically coded indicates that at this age the child does not conceptualize space within two dimensions. Although the errors of the 4-yr-olds tended to be of a self-reference nature with respect to orientation and location on rotation trials the axes of the self-reference system were not coordinated. Six and 10-yr-old children performed significantly better on both conditions, with the exceptions that the 6-yr-olds continued to preserve some orientations within a self-reference system. When topographical codes were removed and S imagined rotation there were no significant age differences in total errors; however, older children organized entire subspaces within a self-reference system. The findings support Piaget and Inhelder's hypothesis that two-dimensional reference systems do not develop until the period of concrete operational thought, and they also indicate that even at age 10, the self-reference system continues to function when topographical codes are absent. Several cognitive mechanisms proposed to account for the development of spatial abilities are critically discussed.     

Deep and surface structure in children's sentence learning

Fifth-graders were asked to learn 32 syntactically varied, semantically unrelated sentences containing combinations of agentive, objective and instrumental case relations. Five learning trials, each followed by a noun-prompted recall test, were provided. Recall patterns indicated that variations in surface structure complexity (i.e., verb voice and sentential position of noun prompts) exerted less influence on Ss' memory for sentences than deep structures. Several trials were required for Ss to reproduce syntactic details accurately and many transformational errors were observed. Even then, children were unable to learn one syntactic form. Although patterns of recall were more consistent with deep structure predictions, results were not completely supportive of Fillmore's analysis of deep structure in terms of case relations, and the possibility that other non-linguistic means were used to store sentences loomed as an alternative to the deep structure view.     

Humphreys's attenuated test of Spearman's hypothesis

Humphreys's test of Spearman's hypothesis (viz., that the size of the standardized black-white differences on various psychometric tests is positively related to the tests' loadings on g, the general intelligence factor) is methodologically weak. It is based on comparison of a fairly representative sample of the black population of U.S. school children with a highly selected sample of the white school population, representing the lowest 15 to 20% of whites in socio-economic status (SES). A fair test of the hypothesis requires that the black and white samples should not be selected on any g-correlated variable, such as SES. Selection attenuates and distorts the relationship between tests' g loadings and the magnitude of the standardized mean black-white differences on the tests. Other unorthodox conditions in Humphreys's study, such as performing factor analysis on the test-score means of various arbitrary demographic groups instead of on individual test scores inflates tests' g loadings and biases the test of Spearman's hypothesis by restriction of reliable variance in g loadings. Humphreys's study cannot be considered a proper replication of Jensen's examination of Spearman's hypothesis in 11 different studies comprising 74 different tests, which consistently bears out Spearman's hypothesis.     

Repetition of cues in children's oddity learning and transfer

The hypothesis that repetition of specific cues interferes with oddity learning was directly tested by comparing two groups of preschool (3 to 5 years of age) children, one with repeated cues and the other with new cues on every trial. Repetition of cues retarded oddity learning confirming previous speculation based on error analyses. Performance on postsolution transfer trials with repeated cues was not affected by conditions of acquisition. Significant age effects were found in oddity acquisition, while there was only weak evidence for agerelated performance differences on transfer trials. Transfer performance on trials with repetition of cues was not related to whether or not the children were informed of such repetition. The results were related to theories of oddity acquisition and transfer.     

Sex-role aspects in the development of children's vocational knowledge

Recent research suggests important age and sex differences in the sex-typing of children's vocational interests. The present study adds to this area by examining several dimensions of job choices in children of four age groups (early and late preschool, second and fourth grade). The 120 children interviewed were asked three fixed-choice questions regarding nine jobs, along with open-ended job choice items. Analysis of age effects on several predetermined dimensions showed that older children were more selective in personal job choice, especially in regard to jobs attributed to the opposite sex. Avoidance of choices associated with the other sex was stronger in boys, but other sex differences were dependent on mode of inquiry rather than on sex. Girls were less limited than boys in job interests when asked about specific jobs but expressed more restricted choices on open-ended items. Implications of these findings both for further research and educational practices are considered.     

Differential reinforcement of other-than-vocalization as a control procedure in the conditioning of infant vocalization rate

The purpose of the present study is to demonstrate reinforcement control over infant vocalization rates using a DRO schedule to control for elicitation of social stimulation. Mothers of four 2 1/2- to 3-month-old infants provided social reinforcement for their infants' vocalization under two schedules: continuous reinforcement (CRF) and differential reinforcement of other-than-vocalization (DRO). In a repeated-reversal single-subject experimental design, all four infants produced systematically higher vocalization rates during CRF, even though densities of social stimulation during DRO were equal to or greater than densities provided during CRF. Thus, whatever its elicitation value, social stimulation may reinforce infant vocalization rates.     

The development of memory structure as reflected by semantic-priming effects

This study was designed to investigate the development of knowledge about categorical and associative relationships as reflected by the presence or absence of semantic priming effects. Kindergarteners and second-graders were shown pairs of pictures, one picture at a time, and asked to name each picture as rapidly and accurately as possible. Picture pairs were of four types which reflected the factorial combination of associative relatedness (high and low) with categorial relatedness (high and low). An analysis of naming times revealed a significant main effect of associative relatedness, i.e., second pictures or “target” pictures in high-associative pairs were named faster than those in low-associative pairs. This reduction in naming latency, or priming effect, was independent of developmental level. However, the effects of category relatedness varied with developmental level, i.e., target pictures in high-categorical pairs were named significantly faster than those in low pairs by second-graders, but not by kindergarteners. These findings are discussed in terms of previous estimates of children's semantic competence.