Preschoolers' Use of Reflective Properties: Identification of Reflections on Partially Transparent Surfaces

This exploratory study extended past studies of children's ability to reference the mirror as a tool in locating the source of reflected images to preschoolers' ability to use the affordances of a transparency. Thirty-six children (3.5 to 5 years old) were shown nonreflected lights and lights reflected on a partially transparent, glassy surface. Children did not spontaneously locate the source of the reflected image. However, they were able to verbally discriminate reflected from nonreflected images following training. These findings indicate that, although preschoolers may not spontaneously use transparencies as a perceptual tool, the ability to distinguish visual differences of reflected from nonreflected images on transparencies is likely within preschool children's developmental capacity.     

Development of the concept of family in elementary school children

Two studies were conducted to examine the relation of age, gender, and family structure to children's understanding of the concept of family. In Study 1,387 children in Grades 1 through 6 were asked to classify various groupings of individuals as constituting or not constituting a family. Results showed both age and gender differences in children's conceptions of families: Younger children, especially boys, generally used concrete, absolute criteria for defining a family; younger girls were similar to older children in that they were more likely to employ abstract, relational criteria for family definition. Results also showed that children's own family structure was not related to their family definitions. In Study 2, 64 children from the original sample were given a measure of cognitive ability to examine whether differences in cognitive development or differences in socialization were a likely source of younger girls' more advanced understanding. Gender differences in cognitive ability did not emerge, suggesting that the gender effects in Study 1 reflected differences in the socialization of boys and girls. Implications of the findings for understanding children's reactions to family disruption are discussed.     

儿童掌握能力概念的特

选取4岁组、5岁组、7岁组、10岁组和12岁组儿童共160名（各年龄组32名,男女各半）为被试,采用个别测验法,从能力的跨情境稳定性、能力的效力和能力的不可控性3个维度探讨学前和小学儿童的能力概念的发展。结果表明,（1）儿童对能力的跨情境稳定性、对能力的效力和对能力的不可控性的认识代表着儿童不同的能力概念。（2）儿童对能力的跨情境稳定性的认识和对能力的效力的认识均存在显著的年龄差异,它们都反映了儿童能力概念的发展性差异,两者在4~12岁期间都随年龄而不断发展,但发展的时间与速度不同,前者的发展早且快。（3）儿童对能力不可控性的认识不存在显著的年龄差异,它反映了儿童能力概念的个体差异     

Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays

In the first study using point-light displays (lights corresponding to the joints of the human body) to examine children's understanding of verbs, 3-year-olds were tested to see if they could perceive familiar actions that corresponded to motion verbs (e.g., walking). Experiment 1 showed that children could extend familiar motion verbs (e.g., walking and dancing) to videotaped point-light actions shown in the intermodal preferential looking paradigm. Children watched the action that matched the requested verb significantly more than they watched the action that did not match the verb. In Experiment 2, the findings of Experiment 1 were validated by having children spontaneously produce verbs for these actions. The use of point-light displays may illuminate the factors that contribute to verb learning.     

Footprints sticking out of the sand. Part 1: Children's perception of naturalistic and embossed symbol stimuli

The shading information in images that depict surfaces of three-dimensional objects cannot be perceived correctly unless the direction of the illuminating light source is known, and, in the absence of this knowledge, adults interpret such images by assuming that light comes from above. In order to investigate if children make use of a similar assumption, we analysed data from 171 children between the ages of 4.6 and 10.8 years using 10 images (shown upright and upside-down) that could be perceived as either convex or concave. Each of five images depicted a naturalistic picture (e.g., a footprint), each of the other five depicted an embossed symbol (e.g., a square). On each of 20 trials, a child was presented with either an upright or upside-down image, and indicated whether the depicted shape appeared convex or concave. Our main findings are that (i) naturalistic stimuli are significantly more likely to be perceived as if light comes from above than symbol stimuli, and (ii) children's propensity to interpret stimuli as if light comes from above increases significantly with age, and at a similar rate for naturalistic and symbol stimuli. These results suggest that, irrespective of any innate competence, children's ability to interpret shading information is gradually refined throughout childhood.     

Syntactic awareness and verbal performance from preschool to fifth grade

Children from preschool to fifth grade were given two independent series of language tasks. The first tested aural sentence memory and was designed to assess children's ability to exploit syntactic structure and semantic cohesion to facilitate sentence recall. The second tested children's syntactic awareness, as reflected in their ability to correct grammatically deviant sentences. Results showed increases with grade level both in children's syntactic awareness and in their use of linguistic structure in sentence recall. Further, syntactic awareness increased with age, independently of vocabulary age. Syntactic awareness was significantly related both to reading achievement and to the use of syntactic structure and semantic structure to facilitate sentence recall, even with the effects of vocabulary age and grade statistically controlled. Although strongly correlated with verbal ability, syntactic awareness appears to constitute a higher-order language skill that is associated with other aspects of verbal performance.This research was carried out at the University of Melbourne and was supported by a University of Melbourne Research Development Grant.     

Preschoolers' comprehension of goal structure in narratives

Preschool children's understanding and use of goals were studied in two experiments. Children heard stories in the presence of pictures or props. The stories were varied by goal success occurring early or late in the story, with late goal success resulting in more causal connections in the narrative. The results showed that children recalled goals spontaneously and that their recall benefited from goal structure of the stories. Pictures benefited the children when the stories were short. Enactment of the props versus static displays of the props did not enhance recall in the second experiment. Preschool children thus demonstrated ability to infer and use goal and causal information in stories for both picture and object support.     

The role of memory and integration in early time concepts

The nature of 5- to 8-year-old childrens ' time concepts was examined by analyzing two possible explanations for the greater difficulty children demonstrate in comparing durations that differ in beginning times as compared to those that differ in ending times. The explanations were (a) poor recall of beginnings as compared to endings due to their lower salience, (b) difficulty in integrating information from both points and reliance on endings only due to their greater salience. The subjects were 630 boys and girls from kindergarten to second grade. The children were presented with a series of two lights in different orders and combinations and were asked to compare order of beginnings and endings, and duration of the two lights. Results contradicted the memory explanation. In addition, repetitious questioning about order of one point (beginning or ending) appeared to have shifted children's attention from that point to the complementary point. Possible sources of children's failure to integrate beginning and end points when comparing durations were discussed.     

The emergence of tool use during the second year of life

Despite a growing interest in the question of tool-use development in infants, no study so far has systematically investigated how learning to use a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach object progresses with age. This was the first aim of this study, in which 60 infants, aged 14, 16, 18, 20, and 22months, were presented with an attractive toy and a rake-like tool. There were five conditions of spatial relationships between the toy and the tool, going from the toy and tool being connected to there being a large spatial gap between them. A second aim of the study was to evaluate at what age infants who spontaneously fail the task can learn this complex skill by being given a demonstration from an adult. Results show that even some of the youngest infants could spontaneously retrieve the toy when it was presented inside and touching the top part of the tool. In contrast, in conditions with a spatial gap, the first spontaneous successes were observed at 18months, suggesting that a true understanding of the use of the tool has not been fully acquired before that age. Interestingly, it is also at 18months that infants began to benefit from the demonstration in the conditions with a spatial gap. The developmental steps for tool use observed here are discussed in terms of changes in infants' ability to attend to more than one item in the environment. The work provides insight into the progressive understanding of tool use during infancy and into how observational learning improves with age.     

Use of context in question answering by 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children

This study investigates, within the theory of relevance of Sperber & Wilson (1995), how 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children (n = 45) use context when answering questions. The children were required to answer questions that placed differing contextual and processing demands on them, as predicted by the theory. The results indicate that an increasing ability to use complex contextual information was related to age and was reflected in the children's ability to answer questions appropriately. A developmental pattern became evident in terms of how the children assigned referents, enriched semantic underdetermination, and recovered implicatures. It also became evident that even at the age of 5 years 6 months the children were in the process of becoming more skilled at integrating contextually complex inferences. It was further shown how children's selection of the appropriate context, given the focus of the question, depended on how relevance was achieved in that context.     

Recollection rejection: how children edit their false memories.

A new methodology is presented for studying children's ability to suppress memory reports of false-but-gist-consistent events, one that measures children's use of a specific editing operation (recollection rejection) that suppresses false reports by accessing verbatim traces of true events. Children make memory reports under 2 instructional conditions, verbatim and gist, and the data are analyzed with fuzzy-trace theory's conjoint-recognition model. Application of the new methodology in studies of children's false memory for narrative events revealed that (a) false-memory editing increases dramatically between early and middle childhood, (b) even young children spontaneously edit their false memories, (c) measures of children's false-memory editing react appropriately to experimental manipulations, and (d) developmental reductions in the incidence of false-memory reports are primarily due to developmental improvements in verbatim memory ability (rather than to decreases in the formation of false memories). Implications for child forensic interviewing are discussed.     

The pigeon's perception of saturation.

Three experiments used similar methods to investigate the pigeon's perception of saturation of monochromatic lights. This trial-wise procedure consisted of brief presentations of positive and negative stimuli in random sequence. Pecks to the positive stimuli were occasionally reinforced on a low fixed-ratio schedule. The first study determined absolute thresholds for "white" and monochromatic lights by establishing a discrimination between lights of various radiances and a dark key. Experiment II investigated generalization from a white light to various monochromatic lights under conditions that minimized the use of luminance as a cue. The third experiment examined discrimination of various monochromatic lights along a colorimetric purity continuum; responses to white light were reinforced, while responses to lights that combined white and monochromatic lights in various proportions were not. The results indicated that lights of different wavelength differ in saturation, but that all are discriminable from white. Wavelengths between 550 and 600 nm are least saturated for the pigeon, and saturation increases markedly as wavelength decreases below this region of the spectrum.     

Preschoolers' fantasy-reality distinctions of emotional events

Research suggests that emotions influence children's ability to discern fantasy from reality; however, reasons for this association remain unknown. The current research sought to better understand the mechanisms underlying children's distinctions by examining the roles discrete emotions and context have in 3- to 5-year-olds' evaluations of fantasy and reality. In Study 1, children's fantasy-reality distinctions of images depicting happy, frightening, or sad events were obtained under two conditions: Children responded freely or were motivated to respond accurately. When responding freely, older children reported that happy and sad fantastic and real events could occur but frightening events could not. When motivated to respond accurately, children's accuracy improved for fantasy but not for reality. Study 2 examined real events exclusively and found that children may lack the knowledge that frightening, but not happy or sad, real events can occur. The findings provide new insight into how emotions affect children's fantasy-reality distinctions.     

Confidence judgments in event recall: developmental progression in the impact of question format

Two studies were conducted to examine developmental progression in children's and adults' ability to adequately monitor their own attempts to recall event details as well as the dependence of such metamemorial competencies on question formats. Eight and 10-year-old children as well as adults (Study 1, N=116; Study 2, N=60) rated their confidence when responding to specific questions about an observed event. Confirming most recent results, children and adults gave higher confidence ratings after correct than after incorrect answers. This ability, however, was limited to an unbiased question format. When being asked misleading questions, children's ability to differentiate was undermined, as reflected in equally high confidence judgments after correct and incorrect answers, even when the interview contained a mix of misleading and unbiased questions. When the interviewer "bombarded" the children with an uninterrupted series of misleading questions, children's difficulties appeared to be even more pronounced. These findings highlight the importance of the way in which questions are asked, and point to age-related progression in the relative impact of questioning style.     

Source monitoring and false memories in children: relation to certainty and executive functioning

We presented children aged 6, 8, and 10 years with a video and then an audio tape about a dog named Mick. Some information was repeated in the two sources and some was unique to one source. We examined: (a) children's hit rate for remembering whether events occurred and their tendency to make false alarms, (b) their memory for the context in which events occurred (source monitoring), (c) their certainty about hits, false alarms, and source, and (d) whether working memory and inhibition were related to hits, false alarms, and source monitoring. The certainty ratings revealed deficits in children's understanding of when they had erred on source questions and of when they had made false alarms. In addition, inhibitory ability accounted for unique variance in the ability to avoid false alarms and in some kinds of source monitoring but not hits. In contrast, working memory tended to correlate with all forms of memory including hits.     

3~5岁幼儿职业声望垂直空间、大小双重隐喻发展

为探讨3~5岁幼儿职业声望认知及职业声望垂直空间、大小双重隐喻的发展规律,研究采用将高声望职业人物和低声望职业人物图片放置垂直空间的上方/下方和大/小的人物剪影图片的任务操作。通过2个实验及综合分析结果发现：3岁幼儿职业声望隐喻理解能力开始萌芽,高职业声望为“上”的正极概念隐喻开始出现; 4岁幼儿职业声望隐喻理解能力得到发展,已形成高职业声望为“上”、“大”,低职业声望为“下”、“小”的双重隐喻能力; 5岁幼儿职业声望的双重隐喻能力进一步加强。研究揭示：3~5岁幼儿对职业声望的隐喻加工存在正极优势。幼儿对职业声望的垂直空间和大小双重隐喻理解能力的发展不同步,职业声望的垂直空间隐喻发展优于大小隐喻。     

儿童时间认知研究范式：困境与超越

西方实证主义导引下的儿童时间认知研究范式在取得丰硕成果的同时也渐入困境。以四种常见范式为突破口凝炼,困境是：(1)钟表时间认知范式能否涵盖儿童时间认知的全部内容;(2)各范式的使用与不同时间思维间能否有效适配;(3)共同量值系统(common magnitude system, CMS)能否从行为层面为儿童时间认知作出根源性解释;(4)在暂未发现成人时间认知特定脑机制的前提下,儿童时间认知脑机制的探索有多大的必要性与可行性等。诸困境折射出学界对儿童“经验”、“线性”时间的斜重;对“观念”、“周期性”时间的慢轻。中国时文化讲求以时间统摄空、物、人四者为一体,未来研究可将儿童时间认知归置于“时间-事件”背景之中,从具身情境、人际互动、时间言语习得与行为管控等方面超越。     

Executive processing differences between learning-disabled,mildly retarded,and normal achieving children

This study examined possible executive processing differences between mildly retarded, learning-disabled, and normal achieving children. To this end, the groups were compared as to their ability to recall central and secondary words from base and elaborative sentences under conditions of high and low encoding effort. Executive processing was inferred from the children's ability to maintain optimal recall performance for central and secondary words. Groups were comparable in central recall, but differences in secondary recall occurred for the high- effort encoding condition. Qualitative differences related to the prioritizing of resources (as reflected in the correlation between central and secondary recall) and monitoring the transfer of information (as reflected from central and secondary recall insertions) were found between groups. The results were discussed in terms of an executive processing frame-work that views retarded children as suffering from inefficiencies related to the sharing of resources, whereas the learning-disabled children's inefficiencies were related to the discrimination of resources.The author is indebted to Karl Schemdli, Director of Special Education and Susan Swaim, Research Director, University of Northern Colorado Laboratory School, for their administration assistance in providing children for this study. The author is indebted to Dr. Jim Nicholes for his assistance in the data collection.     

Distinguishing norm-based from exemplar-based coding of identity in children: evidence from face identity aftereffects

Children's performance on face identification tests improves dramatically between age 4 and adolescence, yet the source of this improvement is controversial. We used face identity aftereffects to examine whether changes in the organization of face-space during childhood could be a source of this improvement. Specifically we tested whether 7- to 9-year-old children, like adults, show patterns of aftereffects predicted by coding facial identity relative to a norm or the patterns predicted by exemplar-based coding. Consistent with use of norm-based coding children's aftereffects were larger (a) for opposite than non-opposite adapt-test pairs equated for perceptual similarity, and (b) for adaptors far from the average than for adaptors closer to the average. In addition, face identity aftereffects were present by age 5, suggesting adult-like face-space properties by 5, though we did not conduct specific tests to distinguish norm-based from exemplar-based coding in this age group. We conclude that children's poor face identification skills cannot be attributed to a failure to use norm-based coding.