Gender differences in children's divergent thinking

Block's theory (1984) of gender differences was examined to determine if it could explain inconsistencies in the reports of gender differences and the personality correlates of creativity in children. Additionally, an investigation of 244 gifted children in grades 4 to 8 is described. Two divergent thinking tests, each with a familiar and an unfamiliar item, were used to test cognitive style. The Dependency Proneness Test was used to measure independence, and the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation‐Behavior Children was used to measure social orientation. No gender differences were found on the measures of personality and cognitive style, and no significant association was found between cognitive style and personality. The results were discussed in light of the moderating influence of sex‐role flexibility and the relative freedom boys and girls experience in peer groups and play.     

Preschool children's eye‐movements during pictorial recall

We investigated eye‐movements during preschool children's pictorial recall of seen objects. Thirteen 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children completed a perceptual encoding and a pictorial recall task. First, they were exposed to 16 pictorial objects, which were positioned in one of four distinct areas on the computer screen. Subsequently, they had to recall these pictorial objects from memory in order to respond to specific questions about visual details. We found that children spent more time fixating the areas in which the pictorial objects were previously displayed. We conclude that as early as age 3–4 years old, children show specific eye‐movements when they recall pictorial contents of previously seen objects.     

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.     

Anxiety responses to a divergent production task among high and low divergent performers

Undergraduate psychology students (4 men, 17 women) completed the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, wrote down as many uses as they could think of for each of a list of 30 items, and completed the anxiety inventory again. Divergent performance was defined as the total number of uses a subject listed. The hypothesis that divergent performance would be correlated with a reduction in state anxiety was confirmed.     

Parenting in youth tennis: Understanding and enhancing children's experiences

ObjectiveThe overall purpose of this study was to develop a grounded theory of optimal parental involvement in youth tennis.DesignA Straussian grounded theory methodology (Corbin and Strauss, 2008, Strauss and Corbin, 1998) was used. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with 90 youth tennis players, ex-youth players, parents, and coaches from the United Kingdom. Data were analyzed through a process of open and axial coding, and theoretical integration. Through this process data were broken down into smaller units (concepts), relationships between concepts were identified, and a substantive grounded theory was developed.ResultsThe grounded theory of optimal parental involvement in tennis was built around the core category of ‘understanding and enhancing your child's tennis journey.’ The core category was underpinned by three categories: (a) Share and communicate goals, which referred to the need for parents and children to have the same aims for the child's tennis involvement; (b) develop an understanding emotional climate, which accounted for the need for parents to continually seek to foster an environment in which children perceived parents understand their experience, and; (c) engage in enhancing parenting practices at competitions, which denoted the specific behaviors parents should display in relation to competitive tennis.ConclusionThe theory predicts that consistency between goals, emotional climate, and parenting practices will optimize parenting in youth tennis.     

Preschool children's comprehension and production of directive forms

Thirty preschool children, 10 each at the 3-,4-, and 5-year-old levels, participated in two structured tasks designed to assess both comprehension and production of a full range of directive forms. In contrast to previous reports, the results indicated no significant differences in directive comprehension or production as a function of age; children in all age groups demonstrated the ability to understand and verbally encode the intent of most types of directive forms. However, the two most implicit forms, Question Directives and Hints, were complied with significantly less frequently than the more explicit forms, and were uused less often in the production task. The present findings indicate the importance of analyzing directive forms along a continuum of explicitness rather than dichotomizing them as direct versus indirect. Finally, the results are interpreted as providing indirect support for the general notion that mastery of some implicit forms may be achieved later than the acquisition of more explicit forms.     

Traces of the artist: Sensitivity to the role of the artist in children's pictorial reasoning

In three studies we investigated the question of whether children consider the attributes of the artist (sentience, age level, affective style, emotion) when making judgments about the traces (drawings) made by that artist. In Study 1, 2–5‐year‐old children were asked to find pictures drawn by a machine, an adult, an older and a younger child. Results indicated that children younger than 4 years do not consider the artists' attributes when making judgments, but 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds do. Furthermore, whereas the oldest children were adept at both machine‐person (sentience) and person‐person (age) contrasts, 4‐year‐olds succeeded only with person‐person contrasts. In Study 2, videotaped artists displayed differences in degree of agitation (affective style) while drawing, and this attribute was manipulated in the drawing by varying line density, asymmetry, line overlap and line gap, or all four features, across stimuli. Three‐ and five‐year‐old children judged whether a calm or agitated person drew the stimuli. Findings showed that five‐year‐old, but not 3‐year‐old, children easily completed the task. In Study 3, 3‐, 5‐ and 7‐year‐old children judged whether happy or sad artists made paintings of matching emotional tone. Performance on this picture judgment task was contrasted with performance on three theory of mind tasks (false belief, emotion and interpretative). The results indicated that 5‐ and 7‐year‐olds successfully judged the impact of artists' emotions on paintings, but 3‐year‐olds did not. Performance on the picture task was related to that on the false belief task, but not to the emotion or interpretive tasks. Taken together, the results suggest that children's view of visual symbols includes a consideration of the qualities of the artist beginning around 5 years, and there appears to be a common link between judgments of the mind behind the visual symbol in the picture task and judgments of mental state reasoning in the false belief task.     

Affective expression in children's fantasy play, primary process thinking on the Rorschach, and divergent thinking

The relationships among expression of primary process thinking on the Rorschach, affective expression in fantasy play, and divergent thinking were investigated in first and second grade children. Sixty children received the rorschach (Holt's scoring system), a play task (Affect in Play Scale), and the Alternate Uses Test. Major hypotheses were supported because the amount of primary process thinking on the Rorschach (frequency and percent) was significantly, positively related to amount of affective expression and primary process expression in play. Also, expression of affect in play (frequency, variety, integration, and comfort) was significantly, positively related to divergent thinking, independent of IQ for both boys and girls. On the Rorschach, percent of primary process was significantly related to divergent thinking for boys. The results suggest that the ability to think imaginatively in a free-association style and the ability to have access to affect-laden material are related processes.     

Situational antecedents of children's anger experiences and subsequent responses to adult versus peer provokers

The purpose of this study was to examine children's reported experiences of anger and their means of expressing anger in their interactions with high versus equal status individuals. Parents and teachers represented high status while siblings and peers represented equal status. Sixth grade children were asked to cite situations in which they experience anger in interaction with peers versus adults and to indicate their typical responses to these situations. We identified 13 categories of situations in which anger was experienced and 11 categories of response to these situations. Anger was experienced in interaction with both high and equal status provokers but of the situations that were identified as producing experiences of anger, nine were reported as occurring differentially in interaction with adults versus peers of the responses to the experience of anger, seven responses were cited differentially in interaction with peers versus adults. The typical responses to adult provoked anger were generally more passive than those to peer provoked anger. Girls more than boys indicated experiencing anger due to adult's task demands but tended to express less overt anger in their interactions with adults than did boys. These findings are consistent with the view that high status of the provoker servers only to inhibit the expression of anger but does not lessen the anger experience itself.     

The effects of intervening experiences on children's memory for a physical examination

To examine the extent to which children's long‐term retention is influenced (both positively and negatively) by intervening events, the impact of three programmed experiences on later recall of the details of a physical examination was explored. Four groups of 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds were established, with all children being interviewed immediately after their check‐ups and then again after 12 weeks. The groups, however, differed in terms of their experiences midway through the delay interval. At each age level, children in three experimental groups received either a complete interview about the physical examination, a return visit to the pediatrician's office, or an opportunity to view a videotape that showed a child receiving an actual check‐up. Children in a fourth group served as controls in that they were not seen during the delay period. Recall of standard features was scored, along with responses to questions concerning procedures that did not occur. The results indicated mixed mnemonic effects for the differential intervening experiences. In comparison to the control group, children at each age who had received an additional interview or who had observed the videotape showed elevated open‐ended recall at the 12‐week interview. In addition, the videotape manipulation, as well as the return visit to the doctor's office, was associated with a marked decrease in the 5‐ but not the 3‐year‐olds' accuracy regarding questions about activities not included in the physical examinations. The results are discussed in terms of factors that affect the facilitation and distortion of memory over long temporal delays. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effect of surface characteristics and style of production on naming and verification of pictorial stimuli.

Theories of object recognition that are based purely on part decomposition do not take into account the role of textural, shading, and color information, nor do they differentiate between stylistic factors in the preparation of line-drawn pictorial stimuli. To investigate these factors, naming and verification experiments were performed using line drawings, monochrome photographs, and color photographs of common objects. For line drawings, it was shown that line width, exposure, and contrast affected naming latency, which increased for lines of narrow width and extremes of exposure. Naming latencies were compared for objects drawn by a professional artist, with varying degrees of surface detail, and objects produced by a computer-aided design (CAD) system, with no surface detail. The mean naming latencies for the artist set were faster than for the CAD set, though not significantly, with a significant degree of object correlation being observed. However, in certain cases there were significant differences between objects. These were investigated in a further experiment in which subsets with common properties of present or absent surface detail were selected from the artist-drawn stimuli. It was found that the presence of surface features resulted in lower response latencies even for those objects that intuitively could be recognized by parts alone. The time to name photographic and line-drawn stimuli was compared, and a progressive decrease in naming latency from line to monochrome to color stimuli was observed. In a verification task, no significant advantage for color or monochrome photographs over line drawings was found, either when comparing stimuli of equivalent or of different mode. However, there was a tendency for the comparison of different modes to take longer than the comparison of same modes. The results are discussed in terms of theories of human visual processing and cognitive and computational models of object recognition.     

Revealing the invisible hand: The role of teachers in children's peer experiences

To introduce this special issue, the concept of the teacher as an “invisible hand” is presented as a metaphor to describe the potentially influential but relatively understudied contribution that educators are likely to have on children’s peer relationships and their broader interpersonal growth. Building from conceptual work distinguishing between the role of adults and peers in children’s social development, we summarize empirical support for the view that teachers are in a position to develop and guide the classroom as a society by simultaneously directing institutional expectations while also providing students with opportunities to collectively construct their own peer culture. Key social development constructs are reviewed from this lens, and the four articles and two commentaries that constitute this special issue are discussed in relation to their contributions to clarifying and extending current views of the role of teachers in school social dynamics. We conclude by considering intervention implications of this work, and we argue that teachers are the one professional in a child’s life who have the opportunity to view the whole child in relation to the social ecology in which he or she is embedded.     

Mental imagery and pictorial memory

Previous research has failed to show consistent effects upon memory performance of individual differences in the use of mental imagery. A test of pictorial memory was devised which varied the ease with which the stimulus patterns could be verbally encoded. A factor analysis related performance in this task to a variety of other individual characteristics. The recall of material which could not be readily verbalized defined a factor within the solution which showed significant loadings of age and performance in the Progressive Matrices, but not of subjective ratings of the vividness of experienced imagery. The recall of material which could be readily verbalized did not contribute to the factorial structure of the results. It was concluded that the two sorts of pictorial material are remembered in quite different ways.     

Television production feature effects on children's comprehension of time

Children's temporal comprehension was assessed after viewing a television program containing a flashback that shifted the events to a much earlier time. The flashback was marked or not marked with sound effects, and time relations were visually represented with either dreamy camera dissolves or abrupt camera cuts. Sixty-four children, equally distributed by grades kindergarten and first versus fourth and fifth, participated in individual viewing sessions. After viewing, children answered questions to assess comprehension on the flashback. Older children understood the flashback better than did the younger children. Children who saw dreamy visual dissolves understood temporal concepts presented in the flashback better than those who saw camera cuts, particularly at young ages. The results suggest that formal production features affect children's comprehension of complex temporal concepts presented via television.     

Viewing direction and pictorial representation

During prolonged monocular observation from afar, an upright wire cube (Necker cube) or a drawing of such a cube inverts continuously so that the lower of the two frontal faces appears to be either in front (version A) or in back (version B). Version A is perceived as if it were viewed obliquely from above and version B as if seen from below. In our experiments, timing the durations of the versions showed that version A lasted longer than version B. When a wire cube was shifted upward so that it was actually viewed slightly from below, version B lasted longer than version A. The actual viewing direction was apparently taken into account by the subjects, which was not the case when the cube was replaced by a drawing showing the projection of the cube. In that case, version A always lasted longer, regardless of the actual viewing direction. This finding conforms with picture viewing in general, where a three-dimensional object’s orientation does not change when the observer’s viewing direction changes.     

The effects of single and dual representations on children's gesture production

Investigations that focus on children's hand gestures often conclude that gesture production arises as a result of having multiple representations. To date, the predictive validity of this notion has not been tested. In this study, we compared the gestures of 82 five-year-old children holding either a single or a dual representation. The children retold a story narrated to them, with pictures, by the experimenter. In one condition the children heard a false belief story and hence, when retelling, held two beliefs—or representations—concurrently. In the other conditions, the children retold a version of the story without the false belief component and therefore held single representations. Children were four times more likely to gesture in the false belief condition than in two comparable true belief conditions, supporting the notion that gestures may function to externalise some of the child's cognitive process, particularly when they hold multiple representations.