Defining the locus of developmental differences in children's causal reasoning

Five experiments were performed in the area of children's causal reasoning to validate a previously reported developmental difference, to examine the role of a possible mediating mechanism, and to test a number of competing theoretical interpretations. As previously, the regularity of a cause-effect pairing influenced the causal attributions of 8- and 9-year-olds but not of 5- and 6-year olds; the results were found not to be artifacts of either a response induced commitment to choosing a particular object or the brevity of the exposure period. The developmental difference also was not explained by discrepant encoding of the term “cause,” by memorial deficiencies, or by differences in criteria for drawing causal inferences. Instead, it appeared that greater perceptual distractibility prevented the younger children from searching for and finding the temporally invariant relationship hypothesized to be crucial to inferring causality in the experimental situation.     

The functional equivalence of problem solving skills

The tower of Hanoi problem is used to show that, even in simple problem environments, numerous distinct solution strategies are available, and different subjects may learn different strategies. Four major classes of solution strategies are described for the problem. Different strategies have different degrees of transferability, place different burdens on short-term memory and on perception, and require different learning processes for their acquisition. The analysis underscores the importance of subject-by-subject analysis of “what is learned” in understanding human behavior in problem-solving situations, and provides a technique for describing subjects' task performance programs in detail.     

A cognitive-behavioral analysis of parental facilitation of children's social-cognitive problem solving

The present study used a case study framework to examine ways in which parental belief systems and parental teaching strategies interact to enhance children's social-cognitive problem solving and school adjustment. The focus of the investigation was to examine the robustness of several postulated typologies of interrelationship among the key variables, as well as antecedents and consequences of means-ends problem solving exhibited by children. Four intact families with second grade children were observed in the home as they participated in discussion and decision making concerning problematic social situations. The data suggested these major points: Parental behavior was generally consistent with their beliefs; parents could most effectively elicit means-ends verbalizations from children through direct questioning; families differed in the extent to which children's inputs into family decision making were valued and the degree of interparental discord concerning beliefs and strategies. The latter points suggest a reconceptualization of how parental variables can be linked to the development of social-cognitive and behavioral competence in children. Specific implications for theory and recommendations for research are discussed.     

Modeling strategy shifts in a problem-solving task

A computer simulation model was fitted to human laboratory data for the Missionaries and Cannibals task to explain (1) the effects upon problem performance of giving a hint, and (2) the effects of solving the problem a second time after one successful solution had been achieved. Most of the variance in the relative frequencies of different moves can be explained by positing that the effect of the hint, or of previous experience in solving the problem, is to cause subjects to switch more promptly from a strategy of balancing the numbers of missionaries and cannibals on both sides of the river, to a means-ends strategy.     

Three aspects of cognitive development

An attempt was made to characterize and explain developmental differences in children's thinking, specifically in their understanding of balance scale problems. Such differences were sought in three domains: existing knowledge about the problems, ability to acquire new information about them, and process-level differences underlying developmental changes in the first two areas. In Experiment 1, four models of rules that might govern children's performance on balance scale problems were proposed. The rules proved to accurately describe individual performance and also to accurately predict developmental trends on different types of balance scale problems. Experiment 2 examined responsiveness to experience; it was found that older and younger children, equated for initial performance on balance scale problems, derived different benefits from identical experience. Experiment 3 examined a potential cause of this discrepancy, that younger children might be less able than older ones to benefit from experience because their encoding of stimuli was less adequate. Independent assessment procedures revealed that the predicted differences in older and younger children's encoding were present; it was also found that these differences were not artifactual and that reducing them also reduced the previously observed differences in responsiveness to experience. It was concluded, therefore, that the encoding hypothesis explained a large part of the developmental difference in ability to acquire new information.     

The development of children's mental tracking strategies on a rotation task

In two experiments, 5- to 13-year-old children were required to mentally track the rotation of a pointer around a circular backdrop, and to indicate the pointer's imagined position on the backdrop at the sound of a signal. In Experiment 1, children imagined the pointer rotate around its end point. In Experiment 2, children imagined the pointer rotate around its midpoint, and indicated the position of one of its two ends at the time of the signal. The end to be indicated was not specified by the experimenter until the time of the signal. Thus, children were required to use an imaging strategy that could keep track of the changing positions of both ends of the pointer. In both experiments, children older than 8 years of age generated linear distance × time functions indicating mental tracking, but younger children did not. In Experiment 2, the proportions of children at each grade level using holistic or part-to-part strategies to mentally track the pointer were comparable, as were mental tracking rates. The results were discussed in relation to both recent research on children's counting, and Piagetian and information-processing views of metal imagery development.     

Self-behavior focus of attention as a determinant of children's and adults' attributions to stories with negative outcomes

This study explored characteristics of attributions made to negative outcome stories by fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-graders as well as college students. All subjects read six stories representing three stories for each of two levels (self-focus and behavior-focus) of a within-subjects factor, Focus of Attention. Dependent measures included both spontaneous attributions and structured evaluations on the dimensions of causality, responsibility, blame, and deservingness. Analyses of the spontaneous attributions indicated that Self attributions were more frequently given than either Behavior or External attributions to both self- and behavior-focus stories. The experimental manipulation of internal focus produced matching attributions only in the self manipulation. Analyses of the structured evaluations indicated that subjects used Cause and Responsibility interchangeably but only eighth-graders and college students differentiated Cause/Responsibility from both Blame and Deservingness. Cause/Responsibility was also shown to have more salience in the behavior-than self-focus stories. It is suggested that a verbal focus on behavior has limited effects in producing defensive, self-distanced attributions but may heighten evaluations of Cause/Responsibility. In addition, behavior-focus seems to have little effect on the development of the psychologically more complex evaluations of blame and deservingness.     

Identifying the relevant aspects of a problem text

Forty-nine subjects judged the relevancy of sentence parts of a word problem (the Allsports problem). Patterns of subjects' judgments suggest three problem-solving heuristics: a SETS heuristic, a TIME heuristic, and a QUESTION heuristic. Presentation of the question before the problem tends to suppress SETS and TIME heuristics. A computer program (ATTEND) is presented to simulate subjects' behavior on the Allsports problem. The program is context-sensitive in that it can change a relevance judgment upon the acquisition of further information. Averaged subject judgments and ATTEND judgments agree for 87% of the items.     

Formal assessment of problem-solving and planning processes in preschool children

While much is known about adult problem-solving, the materials, analyses, and theoretical issues from the adult literature rarely make contact with the tasks typically used to investigate children's thinking. This paper examines the behavior of 4-, 5-, and 6-year-old children attempting to solve a novel variant of the Tower of Hanoi task. Problems varied in difficulty (one to seven moves for the minimum path solution) and in goal type: tower (all objects on one peg) or flat (all pegs occupied). For each problem, children gave verbal statements of their complete solution plan. The Plan Analysis examined performance as a function of goal type and age. Better performance was observed for tower ending problems, and among older children. The Error Analysis revealed that specific error propensities were related to both age and goal type. The Strategic Analysis compared the first move profiles of 6-year-olds to those of several plausible move selection models, and a high degree of correspondence was obtained between specific models and individual children. Young children appear to have rudimentary forms of many of the problem-solving processes previously identified in adults, but they may differ in encoding and representational processes.     

Putting knowledge in its place: A scheme for programming parallel processing structures on the fly

This paper introduces a mechanism called CID, the Connection Information Distributor. CID extends connectionism by providing a way to program networks of simple processing elements on line, in response to processing demands. Without CID, simultaneous processing of several patterns has only been possible by prewiring multiple copies of the network needed to process one pattern at a time. With CID, programmable processing structures can be loaded with connection information stored centrally, as needed. To illustrate some of the characteristics of the scheme, a CID version of the interactive activation model of word recognition is described. The model has a single permanent representation of the connection information required for word perception, but it allows several words to be processed simultaneously in separate programmable networks. Multiword processing is not perfect, however. The model produces the same kinds of intrusion errors that human subjects make in processing brief presentations of word-pairs, such as SAND LANE (SAND is often misreported as LAND or SANE). The resource requirements of the mechanism, in terms of nodes and connections, are found to be quite moderate, primarily because networks that are programmed in response to task demands can be much smaller than networks that have knowledge of large numbers of patterns built in.     

Comprehending quantified sentences: The relation between sentence-picture and semantic memory verification

People were timed as they decided whether quantified sentences like All (some) of the round figures are red were true or false of an accompanying picture. The response latency was a function of the quantifier and the relation between the sets mentioned in the subject and predicate of the sentence. The pattern of latencies was similar to the pattern found for sentences that refer to concepts in semantic memory, e.g., All (some) dogs are animals (Meyer, 1970). This result suggests that the same process may be operating in both domains. Two alternative models of the process are considered. One model assumes that the common process consists of computing the relation between the two sets mentioned in the sentence. The other model assumes that the common process consists of comparing the representation of the sentence to the representation of information computed from the second source. Both models are integrated with broader theories of performance in various comprehension tasks.     

A partial resolution of the paradox of interference: The role of integrating knowledge

It has been noted that models of memory that posit retrieval interference imply that the more one knows about a topic, the harder it is to retrieve any one of these facts. Smith, Adams, and Schorr (Cognitive Psychology, 1978, 10, 438–464) regard this to be a paradox and postulate that people use world knowledge to integrate various facts about a concept and thereby avoid interference. Exploring this issue further in two experiments we discovered that integration of facts alleviates interference only when a person can perform his memory task by simply making a consistency judgment and can avoid the need to retrieve a specific fact. When foils force subjects to retrieve the specific assertion, the interference occurs among integrated facts as among unrelated facts. It appears that, when possible, subjects will judge whether they have seen a fact simply by judging if it is related to (consistent with) a theme they have studied. In other words, people judge themes rather than facts. Consistent with this interpretation, we found interference among themes; that is, the more themes were associated with a concept, the greater the interference.     

Developmental changes in children's use of semantic information in recall

Third and seventh graders (age 9 and 13 years) were randomly assigned to three instructional groups and engaged in a sort/recall task. The instructions emphasized either (a) recall of the items, (b) meaningful organization of the items, or (c) meaningful organization and recall of the items. Regardless of instruction, seventh graders sorted 20 unrelated items into semantically-based groupings and exhibited elevated levels of recall. Third graders instructed to group items to facilitate recall formed seemingly random groupings and recalled significantly fewer items than third graders instructed to make semantically-based groupings, even when some of these latter subjects were unaware of a subsequent recall trial. The results indicated that young children are capable of adult-like organizational strategies but are unaware of their relevance to recall performance or conditions under which organization might be an appropriate strategy.     

The effect of imagining an event on expectations for the event: An interpretation in terms of the availability heuristic

Previous studies have indicated that explaining a hypothetical event makes the event seem more likely through the creation of causal connections. However, such effects could arise through the use of the availability heuristic; that is, subjective likelihood is increased by an event becoming easier to imagine. Two experiments were designed to demonstrate this principle. In Experiment 1, subjects asked to imagine Jimmy Carter winning the presidential election (prior to the election) predicted that he was more likely to win than subjects asked to imagine Gerald Ford winning. In Experiment 2, subjects asked to imagine a good college football season for the previous championship team were more likely to predict a major bowl bid than subjects asked to imagine a bad season, although the effect did not appear in predictions of the season record. In both studies, subjects who were also asked to explain the imaginary event were no different from subjects who only imagined. Several other attributional distortions are interpreted in terms of the availability heuristic.     

Perception in chess

This paper develops a technique for isolating and studying the perceptual structures that chess players perceive. Three chess players of varying strength — from master to novice — were confronted with two tasks: (1) A perception task, where the player reproduces a chess position in plain view, and (2) de Groot's (1965) short-term recall task, where the player reproduces a chess position after viewing it for 5 sec. The successive glances at the position in the perceptual task and long pauses in the memory task were used to segment the structures in the reconstruction protocol. The size and nature of these structures were then analyzed as a function of chess skill.     

Eye fixations and cognitive processes

This paper presents a theoretical account of the sequence and duration of eye fixation during a number of simple cognitive tasks, such as mental rotation, sentence verification, and quantitative comparison. In each case, the eye fixation behavior is linked to a processing model for the task by assuming that the eye fixates the referent of the symbol being operated on.     

Span and rate of apprehension in children and adults.

Children and adults quantified random patterns of dots, under unlimited exposure duration. For adults and children two distinct processes appear to operate. For adults the quantification of collections of from one to three dots is essentially errorless, and proceeds at the rate of 46 msec per item, while the quantification rate for from 4 to 10 dots is 307 msec per dot. For children the same operating ranges appear to hold, however children are much slower. The lower slope is 195 msec per dot, while the upper is 1049. Although the results for adults and children are similar except for the overall rates, the nature of the isomorphism between children and adults is unclear.     

A learning algorithm for boltzmann machines

The computational power of massively parallel networks of simple processing elements resides in the communication bandwidth provided by the hardware connections between elements. These connections can allow a significant fraction of the knowledge of the system to be applied to an instance of a problem in a very short time. One kind of computation for which massively parallel networks appear to be well suited is large constraint satisfaction searches, but to use the connections efficiently two conditions must be met: First, a search technique that is suitable for parallel networks must be found. Second, there must be some way of choosing internal representations which allow the preexisting hardware connections to be used efficiently for encoding the constraints in the domain being searched. We describe a general parallel search method, based on statistical mechanics, and we show how it leads to a general learning rule for modifying the connection strengths so as to incorporate knowledge about a task domain in an efficient way. We describe some simple examples in which the learning algorithm creates internal representations that are demonstrably the most efficient way of using the preexisting connectivity structure.     

Evaluative and taxonomic encoding in children's memory

The experiments were conducted to investigate the development of evaluative and taxonomic encoding in children's memory. The task used was a modification of the Wickens short-term memory task in which subjects' recall of words is tested following a distraction task. The first experiment found that 11-year-old children, but not 8-year-old children, encoded words using the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential. In the second experiment, both 7- and 11-year-olds demonstrated the ability to encode words according to taxonomic categories. These findings were related to other recent work on the development of encoding in memory.