Children's uncertainty about the interpretation of ambiguous messages

Three investigations were made into relationships between children's uncertainty about the correctness of their interpretation of an ambiguous message, and their judgment of the quality of that message. In the first two investigations, we compared one condition under which 5-to 6-year-olds made a single interpretation of an ambiguous message, with another condition under which they could make both possible interpretations. It was found that making both interpretations had no effect on children's confidence about the correctness of a particular one of the interpretations. Children who made both interpretations were often confident about the correctness of one of them. In the second investigation, we found that children who were uncertain about the correctness of one particular interpretation, did not necessarily realize that they could not tell which of the two possible interpretations was correct. They did not necessarily recognize the ambiguity in the message. In the third investigation, we identified children who correctly identified messages as ambiguous after they knew that they had made the wrong interpretation, but who were confident of the correctness of their interpretation of ambiguous messages before they knew the outcome. Hence awareness of uncertainty when making an interpretation may not be necessary for the development of understanding ambiguity. The results are discussed in terms of the significance of the child's awareness of uncertainty for development of understanding about message ambiguity.     

Knowing when you don't know enough: Children's judgements about ambiguous information

Two experiments were carried out to find out whether young children's failure to realise when messages are ambiguous is specific to verbally transmitted information about a person's intended meaning. In Experiment 1, children judged whether they had been told/shown enough to identify which one of a set of cards the experimenter had chosen. In one game the experimenter gave verbal messages about her chosen cards, and in a second game, she gave visual messages. With ambiguous visual messages, relevant parts of cards were physically covered. We expected that this would make it more obvious that the speaker's intended meaning was not being fully conveyed. No difference was found between verbal and visual conditions: correct judgements about message ambiguity occured with the same frequency in both.In Experiment 2, children judged in one game whether they had been told enough about the experimenter's chosen card, as in Experiment 1. In a second game, visual information about a card was not conveyed by the experimenter, Rather, the child operated a pointer, set in a disc with windows, beneath which lay cards. The child judged whether the window showed enough for him/her to tell which card the pointer indicated. Again, correct judgments about ambiguity occured with the same frequency in both games.The results implied that children's failure to realise when verbal messages are ambiguous is but one aspect of a more general failure to realise when one has insufficient information at one's disposal to guarantee a correct interpretation of what the world is like.     

Bases of young children's judgments about more

While the young child's difficulties in correctly comprehending the term less are well known, it appears less widely recognized that young children may also encounter difficulties with the term more. The present study shows that in a task which requires judgments about more to be based on the relative numerosity of sets, 3–4-year-old children may base their judgments on other parameters, such as the extent to which the sets are homogenous with respect to the color of their components. The implications of such findings are briefly considered.     

Effects of hierarchical organization on children's judgments of distance and direction

The impact of the hierarchical organization of a space on judgments of direction and distance was assessed in two studies using two-dimensional models analogous to those used by A. Stevens and P. Coupe (1978, Cognitive Psychology, 10, 422–437). In each study the models contained two stars and were divided into two parts by a curved boundary line. In the Homogeneous condition the stars were located in the same subsection. In the Congruent condition the leftmost star was in the left subsection and the rightmost star was in the right subsection. In the Incongruent condition the rightmost star was in the left subsection and the leftmost star was in the right subsection. In Experiment 1 first graders, third graders, and college students were required to remember the location of the stars. Results indicated that the first and third graders tended to use the relationship between the subsections as a clue to the relationship between the sites within them, thus extending the results of Stevens and Coupe (1978) to children. In Experiment 2 preschoolers, first, and third graders were asked to judge with the materials directly in front of them, which of the two stars was closer to a site located in one of the subsections. Results indicated that the Incongruent condition led to errors among the preschoolers and first graders but not the third graders, thus indicating that these groups tended to judge as closer the site within the same subsection even though it was really farther away. The results of both studies are discussed as indicative of a tendency among young children to impose organization on information encoded in memory and in relation to increases in metric accuracy, decentration, and efficient scanning which enable them to more accurately evaluate when such organization is and is not appropriate. Implications for behavior in large-scale environments are also discussed, with particular reference to the effect of barriers on perceptions of distance and direction.     

A response set analysis of developmental differences in children's moral judgments

The study tested the hypotheses that 1) children may not adopt a moral response set when faced with moral dilemmas and 2) their knowledge of what constitutes a moral constellation of behaviors may differ from that of adults and may lead to developmental differences. To test these hypotheses, the study examined children's responses to a multiple choice moral dilemmas questionnaire under neutral instructions, instructions to answer as a good child or as a bad child. Subjects in fourth and seventh grade were asked whether a story hero would transgress and were required to justify their answers. In addition, questions regarding affective reactions to transgressions, confessions, and due punishment were asked. Fourth grade children answering in the good child instructions condition tended to give significantly different responses than under neutral instructions, while seventh grade subjects did not tend to differentiate between these two instruction conditions. While adult theories of morality would predict a differentiation between good and bad child instructions, on some of the measures no differences were found between good and bad child instructions. The implications of these results for cognitive-developmental theory were discussed and a general framework for interpreting the data was offered.     

The eyes have it: Young children's discrimination of age in masked and unmasked facial photographs

The ability of preschool children to discriminate age, and their use of information from different facial areas in this task, was investigated. Most 4-year-olds were able to rank sets of seven facial photographs into age order successfully. Subsequently, they were presented with facial stimuli in which different regions of the face were masked out. Masking of the eyes produced a marked performance decrement, and masking of the nose and cheeks a slight decrement, relative to masking of either the mouth and chin, or of the hair and neck. Possible explanations of the results are discussed, together with the verbal comments of the children on the cues they were aware of using.     

Children's strategies in producing three-dimensional relationships on a two-dimensional surface

It is a common task to give children a picture containing implicit depth cues and to require them to extract depth information from it. The cues are always selected from the adult repertoire; little is known about children's production of their own cues. In this experiment, 5- to 10-year-old children were required to draw one object behind another in a situation in which adults invariably produce the further object partially occluded by the nearer. The results were an age-related decline in the tendency to segregate the objects and an increase in the tendency to group the objects using partial occlusion, with a cross-over at 8 years. At all ages some children drew one object inside the boundary of the other. It is argued that the results are composed of two tendencies, a gradual mastery of discrete scaling phenomena (e.g., “up” on the page means “further”) within a given style, and a set of decisions to be made between incompatible styles.     

Development of children's ability to judge relative numerosity

Three- to seven-year-old chilren were trained through reinforcement to select either the more or less numerous of two rows of squares. One group was shown rows in which number covaried with row length, one group saw rows in which number covaried with row density, and a third group saw rows in which number did not covary with other dimensions. The children's operational stage was assessed by a number conservation test. All children successfully judged relative numerosity when number covaried with length or with density, but only concrete operational children were successful when number did not covary with other dimensions. Preoperational children are thus not able to base judgments of relative numerosity solely on number.     

Orienting versus learning instructions in children's free recall: New evidence

Ninety-six first graders were given a list of either words or pictures to process under three types of incidental orienting instructions (semantic, directed at list organization; semantic, directed at individual item characteristics; and physical) and an intentional-learning instruction. For pictures and words, list organizational instructions were the most effective, and were superior to intentional-learning instructions. In contrast, individual item-orienting instructions were not better than intentional-learning instructions on either list. Additionally, different patterns of instructional effects emerged on the two list types, which were interpreted with respect to both available data and contemporary processing theories.     

Young children's understanding of displaced aggression

According to previous research, young children do not understand displaced aggression. The present study examines the early phases of the understanding of the causes of moderately and extremely displaced aggression. Preschool and kindergarten children (3 to 5 years of age) viewed eight videotaped episodes of displaced aggression. Their comprehension of this aggression was assessed by means of open ended questions and forced choice picture selections. By age 5 most children had some understanding of displaced aggression, but this understanding was not complete. The early understanding revealed in the present study may be due to the use of short, simple realistic videotaped episodes appropriate for the limited processing abilities of young children. Extreme displacement was not more difficult to understand than moderate displacement.     

Factors affecting the acquisition and elimination of children's donating behavior

Thirty-five 6- to 10-year-old children with initial low rates of donating to help a peer either simply received a fine for each failure to donate (n = 7) or also were informed of the contingency between the fine and failure to donate (n = 28). Explanation of the contingency was necessary to increase children's donation rates. Donations continued at high rates during a gradual, unannounced removal of the fine contingency, but decreased when children were informed that fines were no longer in effect, particularly for children who had failed to donate at least once during training and had actually been fined. Overall, addition of a distraction or an inequity procedure did not reduce donating below rate reductions due to the announced extinction procedure alone.     

The effects of cueing and constraint instructions on children's free recall performance

The performance of nursery school children was investigated in two experiments involving cued and constrained free recall. Under constrained instructions, subjects were required to recall items by category. Under cued instructions subjects could recall items in any order they wished but the organized nature of the lists was identified and subjects were told that they would remember more if they recalled things from the same category together. No effects of cueing instructions were obtained in either Experiment I or Experiment II. Constrained recall instructions led to enhanced recall and category clustering. However, the beneficial effects were not maintained on later trials with the same list or on a transfer list when the constraints on recall were dropped. In addition, the introduction of constrained recall instructions had identical effects whether they were introduced early or late in practice. The results were discussed in terms of the influences of variables which affect the subjects' use of retrieval strategies and the development of memory.     

Kindergarten children's use of category membership

Kindergarten children (N = 70) learned to order 12 photographically presented objects. The objects were well known and either unrelated or categorizable into two, three, four, or six well-known categories. Free recall was assessed. Results indicated that the children used category membership both to learn and to recall the items. However, they processed the list composed of six pairs of items at least as efficiently as lists composed of fewer but larger groups of items (including a list indexed as easiest through previous adult performance).     

Effects of spacing repetitions on children's memory

Two experiments examined the effect of spacing repetitions within a word list on the free recall performance of elementary school children. In the first experiment, spacing repetitions facilitated recall, and the function relating recall of repeated items to the spacing between repetitions was the same throughout the age range investigated (first, third, and sixth graders). But, the function for these elementary school children reached asymptote at a much shorter spacing than the function typically reported for adults. The second experiment was designed to test an encoding variability explanation of spaced-repetition effects in elementary school children. Results for both third- and sixth-grade children were consistent with the hypothesis that differential encoding of repetitions facilitates performance and that spaced repetitions are remembered better because they are more likely to be differentially encoded. A theoretical framework was discussed that may be able to encompass both these results and another finding in the literature which indicates that differential encoding can sometimes impair rather than facilitate children's memory performance.     

The influence of prosody on the recall of monaurally presented sentences.

Semantically anomolous sentences, which were spoken prosodically or in an even monotone, were presented monaurally and recalled after 5 sec of interpolated counting. Recall was superior in the Prosody condition, and performance in the Monotone condition showed no improvement when subjects were given prior knowledge of the syntactic structure. Also, a right ear advantage was found in the Prosody condition. The influence of prosody was attributed to its role in directing attention and providing continuity during memorization of the sentences, this being more effective when the information was received by the language hemisphere from the right ear.     

Effects of directiveness of instructions and surveillance on the production and persistence of children's donations

All subjects earned tokens for correct size judgments and observed a model who had previously earned tokens at the same task donate some of her earnings. Children were subsequently given an opportunity to donate some of their tokens to children at another school. The opportunity to give occurred in presence (surveillance) or absence of the experimenter and after being presented with either directive (you must give) or permissive (you can give if you want to) instructions. Directive instructions and surveillance both produced greater initial giving for all children. In a second session with no modeling, no surveillance, and no further instructions, earlier directive instructions also produced greater persistence of giving for all children. Permissive instructions produced greater reductions in giving over time for boys than for girls. The present findings suggest that directive instructions produce greater initial giving and that donating persists better under these more explicit conditions.     

The effects of review on young children's memory for prose

The present study investigated the effects of review on young children's memory for prose. Prose passages were parsed into three levels of thematic importance. Five groups (128-year-old children each) participated in three experimental sessions, with each session separated by 1 week. During the first session all subjects listened to two passages. One week later, subjects in four of the groups received differing review experiences. During the third session, delayed retention was assessed. The data are interpreted to indicate that the repetition of the original learning experience was the most effective review; however, immediate reproduction following initial exposure also significantly attenuated forgetting. All groups favored the central passage ideas in their delayed recalls, regardless of their review treatment. The potential benefits of an immediate test as a review exercise was suggested.