Learning to form relationships in infancy: Parallel attainments with parents and peers

Freud's assertion notwithstanding, the attachment relationship is not “without parallel” in social life. Children's attainments in forming attachments to parents parallel the steps they take in relating to their peers. During the first 3 years of life, in both domains, infants come to recognize prospective social partners, communicate with them, engage them in patterned interaction, including both cooperation and conflict, learn from their presence and actions, and interact in idiosyncratic ways with particular companions. Toward the end of this period, children show signs of acquiring generalized concepts of the social relationships in which they engage. It is proposed that biological constraints on learning promote human infants' interest in and rudimentary abilities to interact with other members of their species. Subsequent incidental and intentional learning processes shape both the child's attachments and less intense relationships with other persons.     

Organization in visual episodic memory: relationships between verbalized knowledge, strategy use, and performance

Relationships between verbalized knowledge (metamemory), strategy use, and performance were examined in a memory task for visually presented episodes. Kindergarten, second-grade, and fifth-grade students were asked to reconstruct a sequence of pictures forming an episode from an array of original pictures and foils. The episodes varied on two dimensions; materials type and the logic of the sequence. Materials were either typical (familiar animal characters and scenes) or atypical (geometric figures) story materials. Sequences either readily conveyed a story (logical) or were rearranged to present a random ordering of pictures (illogical). Children were questioned about their use of a story line to help remember the picture sequences (general questioning) and were asked more specific questions concerning the reasons for their picture selection during the task (specific questioning). Children at all ages recalled logical sequences better than illogical ones. Second- and fifth-grade children recalled animal episodes better than geometric form episodes. Children at all ages showed a correspondence between strategy use and metamemory as assessed by verbalization of relationships among pictures during the specific questioning. However, when the more typical general question format was used to assess metamemory, strategy use preceded verbalized knowledge of strategy use.     

Speech versus sign comprehension in autistic children: analysis and prediction

Autistic children have severe problems in acquiring language. For this reason, special techniques have been developed to teach them speech and sign language. It is not known, however, whether these children will profit more from speech or sign training. The research literature implies that verbal imitative ability may predict language learning characteristics particularly in the speech modality. In view of this possibility, two groups of autistic children--good versus poor verbal imitators--were studied within the context of a receptive label acquisition task. Good imitators acquired receptive speech whereas poor imitators typically did not. Both groups acquired receptive signs. The results were discussed in terms of the role that imitative ability may play with respect to language acquisition in this population.     

Spatial perspective taking: Coordination of left-right and near-far spatial dimensions

Second- and fourth-grade children viewed a cylindrical object in nine positions on a square display board marked with a 3 × 3 grid. As the object was placed in each position, children identified the view from 90, 180, or 270° positions around the display from a set of photographs. Perspectives in which the object differed from the child's view in both left-right and near-far dimensions were more difficult than perspectives that only transformed one dimension. Error rates decreased with age. There were no main effects of left-right vs near-far or of observer position. Rates of egocentric responding were high at both ages. We note that the complementary spatial dimension to left-right is near-far not front-back. Moreover, the relative ease of front-back transformations in previous research resulted from distinctive front-back cues on the display objects which enabled subjects to use nonspatial strategies to identify observer perspectives.     

Encoding variability and organization in free recall

Measures of category clustering and subjective organization are well-established predictors of performance in free recall tasks. The present studies demonstrate that a measure of encoding variability affords equally powerful and independent prediction of free recall performance. They also illustrate an interaction between encoding processes and organizational activity. In Experiments 1 and 2, the independent contributions of organization and encoding variability are demonstrated in categorizable and uncategorizable lists and in subjects whose recall is expected to increase (adults) or decrease (children) as a function of more varied encodings across trials. In Experiment 3, a category labeling procedure is used to demonstrate that the negative relationship between encoding variability and recall can be reversed by inducing adult-like organizational activity in children.     

The effect of pictorial detail and elaboration on children's retention.

In a visual memory task, two degrees of stimulus detail were compared to test Reese's hypothesis that stimulus detail would facilitate retention of paired associates for young children. Stimuli were presented in an elaborated or nonelaborated fashion so that the effect of detail on retention of both types of materials could be investigated. Four and 5 year-old children were included to assess a reported developmental trend that elaboration facilitates retention for older children but fails to do so for younger children. Both age groups performed equally well, and detail had no effect. Elaboration aided retention significantly. A second study, in which difficulty of the task was increased, yielded equivalent results. The constraints on performance by recall and recognition tasks were discussed.     

Memory development in adolescence: Relationships between metamemory,strategy use,and performance

Eighth and tenth grade students were asked to study and recall a list of paired associates. The word pairs were available either throughout an 8 sec per word study period or only at the beginning and were composed of either high frequency or low frequency words. After recall, students were asked to indicate which of several study strategies they had used with each word pair (read pair carefully, rehearsal, visual elaboration, verbal elaboration). In addition, they were asked which of these strategies would have had the best effect on recall. Knowledge of appropriate memory strategies (metamemory) was positively related to strategy use, and strategy use was positively related to recall performance at both ages. Improved performance with materials available throughout study and with high frequency word pairs was explained by increased use of elaborative strategies. Age differences in performance were explained by increased strategy effectiveness. These results are discussed in relation to changing relationships among metamemory, strategy use, and performance with age.     

Abortion as a stigma: in the eyes of the beholder

The purpose of this study was to investigate social perceptions of a man who impregnated a woman and advised her to have an abortion, and those of a woman who had an abortion. Each subject rated one of four persons on a social distance measure: either a man involved in an abortion, a woman having had an abortion, a male control target, or a female control target. Both abortion targets were perceived less favorably than the control targets. The female abortion target was rejected more by male subjects than by female subjects, and the male abortion target was more rejected by females than by males. While holding permissive attitudes toward abortion was related to willingness to meet the female abortion target, restrictive attitudes toward abortion predicted willingness to meet the male abortion target. Variables related to stigmatization of the man were lack of identification, restrictive attitudes toward abortion, and perceived responsibility. Restrictive attitudes toward women's rights and roles in this society and restrictive attitudes toward abortion predicted stigmatization of the woman. It is suggested that shifting one's attention from characteristics of the stigmatized to observers' characteristics provides a useful perspective on the stigmatization process.     

Semantic organization in the young child: Evidence for the development of semantic feature systems

In two experiments, 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and college students were presented on each trial with a sentence followed by a probe word. Their task was to indicate whether the probe was in the sentence or not. Of primary interest were the false recognitions and the correct latencies that occurred when the probe word was a synonym or antonym of one of the words in the sentence (Experiment I) or when the probe was a subordinate, superordinate, part, or whole (Experiment II). The younger children were more affected by synonymy than antonymy, although the older children and adults were not. At all ages, the categorical relationships caused more recognition confusion than the partwhole relationships. Subjects were more affected when the probe was a superordinate than when it was a subordinate, and somewhat more affected when the probe was the whole than when it was the part. These results suggest that children as young as 5 years of age have well-organized conceptual systems based on shared meaning components.