Memories of Mickey Mouse: Young children recount their trip to disneyworld

What young children remember and how long they retain such information are crucial issues for the study of young children's memory. In this research, these issues were examined by asking children who visited Disneyworld at 37 or 49 months of age to recall their experience. Half of the children were interviewed 6 months after their trip, and the remaining children were interviewed after 18 months. Surprisingly, there were no effects for age or retention interval on the amount children recalled; all children recounted a great deal of accurate information about their Disneyworld experience. However, older children's reports were more detailed than younger children's, and older children tended to recall more information spontaneously than did younger children. Finally, there is some suggestion that children who talked about their Disneyworld experience more frequently with their families subsequently recounted more information during the memory interview. Implications for these findings are discussed.     

Children's metacognitive judgments in an eyewitness identification task

Two experiments examined children's metacognitive monitoring of recognition judgments within an eyewitness identification paradigm. A confidence-accuracy (CA) calibration approach was used to examine patterns of calibration, over-/underconfidence, and resolution. In Experiment 1, children (n=619, mean age=11 years 10 months) and adults (n=600) viewed a simulated crime and attempted two separate identifications from 8-person target-present or target-absent lineups given lineup instructions that manipulated witnesses choosing patterns by varying the degree of social pressure. For choosers, but not nonchoosers, meaningful CA relations were observed for adults but not for children. Experiment 2 tested a guided hypothesis disconfirmation manipulation designed to improve the realism of children's metacognitive judgments. Children (N=796, mean age=11 years 11 months) in experimental and control conditions viewed a crime and attempted two separate identifications. The manipulation had minimal impact on the CA relation for choosers and nonchoosers. In contrast to adults, children's identification confidence provides no useful guide for investigators about the likely guilt or innocence of a suspect. These experiments revealed limitations in children's metacognitive monitoring processes that have not been apparent in previous research on recall and recognition with younger children.     

Age related effects in children taking the computerized assessment of response bias and word memory test.

The assessment of effort is a fundamental component of test performance analysis, since effort determines whether a psychological evaluation is valid. The assessment of effort in children has proven problematic. This may be related to the variable and inconsistent nature of children's developing self-regulatory systems, and the fact that measures commonly used to assess effort were standardized on adults. If one uses effort measures designed for adults to assess children, then one must presume that the maintenance of effort in children is comparable to the same behavior in adults. However, because children's executive functioning, including their abilities to self-regulate, attend, concentrate, and to engage in various cognitive activities improve with time (Barkley, 1997, pp. 209-234), our hypothesis is that young children's effort regulation is dissimilar to that of adults, and the presumption of similarity is implausible. The purpose of this study was to determine whether age is a significant influence upon young children's performances on the Computerized Assessment of Response Bias (CARB) and Word Memory Test (WMT). Statistical analysis suggests that younger children (those under 10 years of age) tended to produce poorer performance on these instruments. Younger children's scores differed significantly from children ages 10 and older. Children 11 years and older produced CARB and WMT results similar to adult participants, suggesting a viability for adult normative comparisons with children in this age range. The current investigation concluded that children's maintenance of effort appears to be significantly related to age and reading ability level. Consequently, the use of current adult-based norms with the CARB and WMT, without regard for a child's developmental status and other contextual factors such as the child's ability to read, appears ill-advised especially with children under 11 years of age.     

The role of expectations in children's experience of novel events

The expectations children bring to interactions, as well as the information they receive prior to them, may be important for children's experiences of new adults. In this study, 148 children (8-13years old) reported on their expectations of adults, received one of three types of information about a new adult (positive, realistic, or control), and then "interacted" with a videotaped "controlling" adult. The effect of information type depended on children's age and prior expectations, with expectancy effects emerging in the context of positive information at the younger end of our age range and in the context of realistic information at the older end of our age range. Furthermore, the more expectations exceeded perceptions (i.e., the more disappointment), the lower children's rapport, affect, and prosocial intentions were and the more internal causal attributions they made. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and applied contributions.     

Children's perceptions of babyfaced adults

Drawing on McArthur and Baron's (1983) ecological theory of social perception, the present research examined younger and older children's ability to differentiate male and female adults who varied in the babyishness of their facial appearance. Children's perceptions of the targets' dominance and warmth were also assessed. Systematic effects were found on all measures and were qualified by targets' sex and children's age group.     

The own-age face recognition bias in children and adults

Children recognize children's faces more accurately than adult faces, and adults recognize adult faces more accurately than children's faces (e.g., Anastasi & Rhodes, 2005). This is the own-age bias. Research has shown that this bias is at least partially based on experience since trainee teachers show less of an own-age bias than do other adults (Harrison & Hole, 2009). The present research tested the own-age bias in three groups of children (age 4-6, 7-9, 10-12 years) and a group of adults in the recognition of three age groups of faces (age 7-9, 20-22, and 65-90 years). Results showed an own-age bias for 7- to 9-year-old children and adults. Specifically, children could recognize faces more accurately if they were less than two years different from their own age than if they were more than two years older or younger. These results are discussed in terms of short-term experience with faces creating biases, and this rapidly changes with age.     

Children's eyewitness reports after exposure to misinformation from parents

This study examined how misleading suggestions from parents influenced children's eyewitness reports. Children (3 to 8 years old) participated in science demonstrations, listened to their parents read a story that described experienced and nonexperienced events, and subsequently discussed the science experience in two follow-up interviews. Many children described fictitious events in response to open-ended prompts, and there were no age differences in suggestibility during this phase of the interview. Accuracy declined markedly in response to direct questions, especially for the younger children. Although the older children retracted many of their false reports after receiving source-monitoring instructions, the younger children did not. Path analyses indicated that acquiescence, free recall, and source monitoring all contribute to mediating patterns of suggestibility across age. Results indicate that judgments about the accuracy of children's testimony must consider the possibility of exposure to misinformation prior to formal interviews.     

Own-age biases in verbal person memory

Two experiments examined own-age biases in younger adults', older adults', and children's verbal person memory. In line with findings from face recognition studies, Experiment 1 showed that younger adults had a better recall of own-age than of other-age targets, while older adults were unaffected by target age. Participants' self-reported interest in targets did not predict target memory. Experiment 2, which examined children's and younger adults' memory of own- and other-age targets, showed an own-age advantage in children's but not in younger adults' verbal person memory. Differences in expertise of own-/other-age targets, in combination with a development of expertise throughout the lifespan, may account for the findings, although alternative explanations should be considered. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Generating initial models for reasoning

Much of the knowledge that children and adults have about the world resides in intuitive models. Previous work shows that intuitive models allow for computation of specific outcomes given information about the system, but little is known about how such models are acquired. The current study tested three hypotheses about how children and adults construct intuitive models when they encounter a new property: (1) intuitive models are constructed by transferring principles from familiar properties; (2) with development, children shift from applying a default model to constructing specialized models; and (3) younger children's model construction is constrained by the domain, but becomes increasingly domain independent with development. Participants from three age groups (10, 13, and 19 years) made a series of judgments about two familiar properties and one novel property. Causal models showed that all age groups transferred principles from the familiar properties to the novel property. None of the age groups used a default model. There was developmental change in the effect of domain; younger, but not older, children's models were affected by domain. These findings suggest that the transfer process is developmentally invariant but that constraints on the process (i.e., domain dependence and understanding of base models) change with development.     

Response latency as a predictor of the accuracy of children's reports

Researchers have explored various diagnostic cues to the accuracy of information provided by child eyewitnesses. Previous studies indicated that children's confidence in their reports predicts the relative accuracy of these reports, and that the confidence-accuracy relationship generally improves as children grow older. In this study, we examined the added contribution of response latency to the prediction of children's accuracy over and above that of confidence ratings. In Experiments 1 and 2, 2nd and 5th graders studied picture-event pairs and were tested using forced-choice, 2-alternative, or 5-alternative questions. In Experiment 3, children watched a slideshow depicting a story and were tested by 5-alternative questions about story details. The children indicated their confidence in each response, and response latency was measured. The results of all experiments suggested that children in both age groups relied on response latency as a cue for confidence, and this reliance contributed to the success with which they monitored the accuracy of their reports. When the test format was easy (Experiment 1), 2nd graders were as accurate as 5th graders in monitoring the accuracy of their answers, and the latency of their responses was no less predictive of accuracy. When the task was more difficult, age differences emerged. Nevertheless, in all experiments and for both age groups, response latency was found to have added value for predicting accuracy over and above that of confidence. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings for predicting the accuracy of children's reports are discussed.     

幼儿情绪理解、情绪调节与其同伴接纳的关系

选取83名4岁幼儿,探讨他们的情绪理解、情绪调节与其同伴接纳的关系.采用表情识别任务、情绪观点采择任务测查幼儿的情绪理解能力,采用教师评定问卷测查幼儿的情绪调节策略,使用照片社会评价法测查幼儿被同伴接纳的程度.结果表明:在总体上,情绪观点采择与情绪调节策略有关,情绪调节策略与同伴接纳有关,情绪观点采择能力与同伴接纳的边缘正相关在控制年龄后消失了;年长组儿童的攻击策略能显著预测同伴接纳,年幼组儿童的情绪观点采择、攻击策略、建构性策略都与同伴接纳有关,但只有攻击策略、建构性策略能显著预测同伴接纳;年幼组儿童的情绪观点采择分别通过攻击策略、建构性策略两条路径间接影响了同伴接纳.研究结果为进一步了解学前儿童同伴接纳的个体差异来源提供了情绪能力方面的数据.     

Defense use and defense understanding in children

This study investigated the relation between children's use of defense mechanisms and their understanding of those defenses. We hypothesized that, once a child understands how a particular defense functions, the use of that defense will no longer be successful and will be replaced by another defense mechanism that is not yet understood. Defense use was assessed from the Thematic Appreception Test (TAT) stories told by 122 children; defense understanding was determined from the children's understanding of stories portraying defenses. The results indicated that younger children (mean age = 7-8) used the defense of denial more than the older children (mean age = 9-11). Older children understood the functioning of denial and projection better than the younger children. A comparison of children who did and did not understand a defense showed that younger children who understood the functioning of denial were less likely to themselves use denial. Likewise, older children who understood the functioning of projection were less likely to use this defense.     

Constraints on representational change: evidence from children's drawing.

This paper uses children's drawing as clues to general constraints on internal representational change and flexibility. Fifty-four children between 4 and 11 years of age each produced six drawings. They were first asked to draw a house, and then to draw a house that does not exist. The same procedure was used for man and animal. The technique forced children into operating on their normal, efficient drawing procedures, and allowed the researcher to ascertain the types of constraint that obtain on representational change and flexibility. Striking developmental differences emerged between the 4- to 6-year-old age group and the 8- to 10-year-old age group. Changes introduced by the younger children involved deletions and changes in size and shape, whereas older children changed position and orientation of elements and added elements from other conceptual categories, resulting in ever-increasing inter-representational flexibility. Development is accounted for in terms of reiterated cycles of change from internal representations specified as a sequentially fixed list, embodying a constraint that was inherent in the earlier procedural representations, to internal representations specified as a structured, yet flexibly ordered set of manipulable features. The constraints are considered to be general and are compared with work on seriation and number in children, and on phonological awareness and musical ability in adults. The results are integrated into a general model of developmental change which is compatible both with initial modularity and with subsequent domain-general constraints.     

Effects of varying post-KR intervals upon children' motor performance

An experiment using post-KR interval methodology was designed to investigate the developmental relationship of age and processing speed regarding performance on a ballistic linear slide task. The hypothesis drawn from the developmental literature was that, given a short time for processing information, younger children should perform less efficiently than older children and adults. However, an increase in processing time should result in performances being more similar. Subjects in the experiment were 90 female children equally divided among 7 and 11-yr-olds and adults. Within age, subjects were randomly assigned to one of three post-KR interval groups: 3, 6, and 12 sec. Conclusions support the processing deficits hypotheses of Chi (1976): given enough time to process KR, the children's performance was not significantly different from the performance of adults.     

The development of cynicism

Two experiments explored the development of cynicism by examining how children evaluate other people who make claims consistent or inconsistent with their self-interests. In Experiment 1, kindergartners, second graders, and fourth graders heard stories with ambiguous conclusions in which characters made statements that were aligned either with or against self-interest. Older children took into account the self-interests of characters in determining how much to believe them: They discounted statements aligned with self-interest, whereas they accepted statements going against self-interest. Experiment 2 examined children's endorsement of three different explanations for potentially self-interested statements: lies, biases, and mistakes. Like adults, sixth graders endorsed lies and bias as plausible explanations for wrong statements aligned with self-interest; younger children did not endorse bias. Implications for the development of cynicism and children's understanding of bias are discussed.     

Preferences and Children's Use of Gender-Stereotyped Knowledge About Musical Instruments: Making Judgments About Other Children's Preferences

A developmental model of gender-stereotype acquisition (Martin, 1989) proposes that by the age of 8 years children draw upon information about gender-stereotyped interests as well as other children's sex when deciding how much other children would like different activities; younger children rely on sex only when making such decisions. We examined whether the judgments that children made about other children's preferences were different from those that they made about their own preferences for masculine and feminine musical instruments. Three hundred twelve children aged 8–9 years ranked 6 instruments in order of preference, and rated on a 4-point scale how much they would like to play each one. Children were then asked to decide how much other children would like to play each instrument. Only girls' own preferences for feminine instruments differed according to the gender-stereotyping of their most-preferred instrument. Judgments about how much other children would like masculine and feminine instruments did not differ according to those children's gender-stereotyped interest. Children made stereotypical predictions about the preferences of children of unknown sex who played either a masculine or feminine instrument. Implications for a theoretical account of the development of children's gender-stereotypes are discussed.     

DIStance-from-the PROtotype (DISPRO) personality assessment for children

We examined a children's version of Broughton's (1990) DISPRO (DIStance-From-the-PROtotype), a multidimensional scaling approach to personality assessment. In this system, a score on a given trait dimension is derived from a subject's judgment about his or her similarity to or distance from a prototype - a hypothetical character who acts in trait-consistent or prototypical ways. The DISPRO assessment model employs eight equidistant trait categories from Wiggins's (1979) interpersonal circumplex. In this study, 74 children (M age = 7.3 years) were told stories about four same-sex characters who performed prototypical acts from a single trait category randomly selected from the circumplex. Results show the structure of children's ratings is remarkably similar to that obtained from adults, but children's ratings show a developmental trend. A sample of younger children (M age = 6) provided a unidimensional solution along a "good-bad" or nurturance continuum. Analysis of an older sample (M age = 8.5) revealed use of the two dimensions of dominance and nurturance commonly found in adult solutions. Significant validity coefficients for parent and teacher criterion measures (average r = .40) and adequate test-retest reliability (average r(tt)= .78) were found. Benefits unique to DISPRO, such as its ease of use and standardization of trait stimuli, are discussed.     

The influence of facial characteristics on children's age perceptions

To examine the impact of age-related variations in facial characteristics on children's age judgments, two experiments were conducted in which craniofacial shape and facial wrinkling were independently manipulated in stimulus faces as sources of age information. Using a paired-comparisons task, children between the ages of 2 1/2 and 6 were asked to make age category as well as relative age judgments of stimulus faces. Preschool-aged children were able to use variations in craniofacial profile shape, frontal face feature vertical placement, or facial wrinkling to identify the age category of a stimulus person. Children were also able to identify the older, but not the younger, of two faces on the basis of facial wrinkling, a finding consistent with previously demonstrated limitations in young children's use of relative age terms. The results were discussed in the context of research which reveals parallel effects of craniofacial shape and wrinkling on the age judgments of adults.     

Development of gaze aversion as disengagement from visual information

Older children, but not younger children, were found to look away more from the face of an interlocutor when answering difficult as opposed to easy questions. Similar results were found in earlier work with adults, who often avert their gaze during cognitively difficult tasks (A. M. Glenberg, J. L. Schroeder, & D. A. Robertson, 1998). Twenty-five 8-year-olds and 26 5-year-olds answered verbal reasoning and arithmetic questions of varying difficulty. The older children increased gaze aversion from the face of the adult questioner in response to both difficult verbal reasoning questions and difficult arithmetic questions. In contrast, younger children (5-year-olds) responded less consistently to cognitive difficulty. It is concluded that adultlike patterns of gaze aversion in response to cognitive difficulty are certainly acquired by 8 years of age. The implications of appropriate gaze aversion for children's management of cognitive processing resources are considered.     

亲社会情境中小学儿童道德情绪判断及其归因研究

该文运用临床访谈法研究了小学儿童在亲社会情境中道德情绪判断及归因状况。结果表明:在亲社会情境中,儿童的道德情绪判断经由消极到积极的发展趋势,年幼儿童倾向于判断助人者会体验到消极的情绪,年长儿童则认为助人者会体验到高兴等积极情绪,并且随着儿童年龄的增长,儿童的情绪体验愈加复杂。在道德情绪归因中,年幼儿童倾向于结果定向的归因,一年级儿童中大部分以道德定向为主,随着儿童年龄的增长,儿童的归因定向逐渐多样化。