The development of metacognitive awareness in memory,communication, and attention

Four- and six-year-olds were asked questions about hypothetical situations in which a child was to perform one of three cognitive activities: (1) to remember something, (2) to communicate a message, or (3) to attend to a visual array. Questions focused on the child's understanding of the following four facts about the variables under study: (1) that it is easier to cognize about a shorter than a longer list (length), (2) that it is easier to cognize in the absence of noise than in its presence (noise), (3) that an adult or older child will find a cognitive problem to be easier than will a younger child (age), and (4) that it is generally easier to cognize with more time than with less time (time). Results indicated that the pattern of understanding was the same across the different cognitive activities, that there was a higher level of accuracy in answering questions about length and noise than about age and time, and that, over all, the 6-year-olds were more accurate than the 4-year-olds.     

Developmental changes in predicting one's own span of short-term memory

Developmental changes in the accuracy of predicting one's own recall were studied, using preschool, third grade, and college subjects in Experiment 1 and third grade and college subjects in Experiment 2. Experiment 1 showed that prediction accuracy increased from the preschool to the college years, subjects were not influenced by a potential “expectancy” bias in the procedure, and only third grade subjects were influenced by the presence of norms about peer performance. Experiment 2 showed that third graders and college subjects lower their predictions in the face of “false” norm information, with college subjects being the only group to under predict actual recall in both experiments. Thus, although adults are significantly more accurate than elementary shool children in estimating short-term recall, their susceptibility to norm information suggests that even they have uncertainty about their exact capabilities.     

The effects of onset and offset warning and post-target stimuli on the saccade latency of children and adults

Two studies, involving children (mean age = 10 years) and adults, investigated the effects of visual stimulus onsets and offsets on the latency of saccades to peripheral targets. Saccade latency was reduced when foveal stimulus onsets or offsets preceded the target. When stimulus onset occurred 100 msec after target onset, the stimulus interfered with responding, with this interference effect significantly greater for children than for adults. When stimuli were presented in the peripheral visual field facilitation and interference effects were similar for children and adults. These results were interpreted as indicating that oculomotor processes are similar in children and adults while the stimulus intake processes that follow stimulus onset at the point of fixation have a greater interference effect on children's than on adults' eye movements.     

Acquiring new word meaning: What does it tell us about development

R. J. Sternberg (1984, Developmental Review, 4, 113–138) offers a thoughtful and provocative essay on how individuals acquire meanings for novel or unfamiliar nouns. The Sternberg essay, however, is incomplete on a number of grounds. By stressing general processes and specific knowledge as critical components in the acquisition of verbal concepts, for example, it overlooks two logically complementary categories—specific processes and general knowledge—and the role these play in the acquisitions in question. A second concern is that the paper blurs distinctions among development, short-term learning, and the origin/acquisition of individual differences. Finally, Sternberg is encouraged to frame the specific phenomenon described here within the context of a larger theory of intellectual development and to indicate what else this specific model can be used to explain.     

Methodological issues in language acquisition research with very young children

It is suggested that the dominance of observational methods in child language research with very young children has limited progress in understanding the language acquisition process. Evidence is presented that, contrary to popular belief, naturalistic methods do not guarantee ecological validity, nor are they free of task biases. Furthermore, observational studies do not necessarily provide better measures of linguistic competence than do more structured methods. Instead, it is argued that new insights from cognitive developmental research are applicable in studying language production in children younger than 3 years. A number of structured techniques are reviewed that have been used or could be used to study language production. It is concluded that a combination of methods is necessary in order to disentangle and control the many variables that enter into the language acquisition process.     

Image tracing: An analysis of its effectiveness in children's pictorial discrimination learning

Previous research has shown that requiring children to trace from memory the correct member of a pictorial discrimination pair markedly facilitates performance. The experiment reported here offers support for a presumed component of this learning strategy, namely, “memory imagery.” In particular, subjects who traced directly on top of the correct picture did not perform as well as those who traced it from memory. Various theoretical explanations of the image-tracing phenomenon are considered, including depth of processing, dual coding, and frequency.     

Effects of timing and justification of witnessed aggression on the observers' punitiveness

Sixty university men who had been treated harshly by the experimenter's accomplice were distributed evenly among four conditions comprising a 2 × 2 factorial design and a “control” group. All of the men watched a moderately aggressive segment from a TV program but in the former case they were given a story summary which depicted the witnessed aggression as either justified or less justified and this summary was provided either immediately before or just after the scene was shown. The fifth group did not have any story synopsis. When the men had an opportunity to punish the confederate at the conclusion of the film, they were nost punitive if they had heard the justified aggression summary after the movie just before they shocked the confederate, and were least punitive if they had been given the nonjustified aggression version before they watched the aggressive incident. These results extend the generality of the findings obtained by other research in this area and also suggest that the violent scene had elicited as well as disinhibited aggression-facilitating reactions in the viewers.     

Effects of sound frequency on behavioral and cardiac orienting in newborn and five-month-old infants

Alert newborn and 5-month-old infants' responsivity to variations in spectral composition of a rattle sound was examined. Each child received four stimulus conditions: low-, mid-, and high-frequency bandpass-filtered rattles and an unfiltered broadband rattle. Stimuli were played through a single loudspeaker laterally positioned, and head orientation and cardiac responses to sound were recorded. Compared to other stimuli, the low-frequency sound elicted less head turning in both age groups, with this effect exaggerated in younger infants. Head orientation toward the mid-frequency, high-frequency, and broadband stimuli did not differ with age. For all conditions, latency and duration of newborns' head turning was longer than that of 5-month-olds. Newborns responded with cardiac deceleration only on trials when they failed to turn. When head turns occurred, an acceleratory cardiac response was obtained. Five-month-olds responded with reliable cardiac deceleration irrespective of head turning toward the sound. Heart rate change did not vary as a function of frequency at either age, suggesting that all stimuli were equally effective in eliciting the infant's attention.     

Children judge "perspective" transformations of letterlike forms as different from prototypes

Children from 5 to 11 years old made same-different judgments of prototypes of letterlike forms paired with transforms of these prototypes generated on a dimension either critical or noncritical for object identification. For compression transformations (noncritical: as in perspective shift), frequency of correct “different” judgments increased as the degree of compression in the transform increased. This result challenges the view that dimensions irrelevant in object identification are ignored or not detected in graphic discrimination.     

Measuring the importance of information in judgment: Individual differences in weighting ability and effort

Measuring the importance of cues in social judgment has been a longstanding problem. Past research has shown individual differences in the impact of ability and study effort on judgments of student performance. This research examined the hypothesis that the individual differences are due to the weight given to the information as opposed to the perceived extremity of the values of the information. Subjects judged the performance of hypothetical students described by ability, study effort, and effort during an exam. Individual differences in the impact of the three types of information were obtained and were predictable from self-reports of the relative importance of information. Different values of weights were necessary to account for the differences in the impact of information, although there were also differences in the perceived extremity of the information. The theoretical and applied significance of distinguishing the weight given to information in judgment from its subjective value are discussed. On the basis of a new review of the literature, as well as the present results, it is concluded that self-reports of the relative importance of information are predictive of individual differences in information use in judgment, but that they may reflect the total impact of information rather than only the weight.     

The role of esteem and coping in response to a threat communication

Two experiments examined the relations among self-esteem, perceived competency to cope, and actual coping behaviors following a threat communication. Leventhal's “parallel response model” (in Advances in experimental social psychology, L. Berkowitz (Ed.), New York: Academic Press, 1970, Vol. 5) predicts that low-esteem subjects will show deficits in both competency and coping behaviors. Experiment 1 manipulated threat level of a tetanus communication. Low-esteem subjects showed coping deficits on measures of free associations, free recall, fatalism, and coping. Threat groups differed only on fear and danger measures. Experiment 2 manipulated the fear level of an antismoking film and used false feedback to alter perceived competency. Positive feedback increased perceived competency to quit smoking among low-esteem subjects only. Without feedback, low-esteem subjects reduced smoking less than high-esteem subjects; positive feedback reversed the pattern. The discussion argued that, consistent with Leventhal's model, the low-esteem coping deficit has two independent causes: (1) excessive concern with fear, and (2) inadequate perceived competency.     

Saccade latency in children and adults: Effects of warning interval and target eccentricity

Saccadic response latency to the onset of an eccentric target was studied in children (mean age = 8.7) and adults. The independent variables investigated were fixation-light offset to target-light onset warning interval (0, 100, 300, and 600 msec) and target eccentricity (5° or 15°). Both children and adults showed shorter saccade latencies under warning-interval conditions. Children were found to have longer latencies than adults with 0 or 100 msec warning intervals but to respond with as short or shorter latencies with 300 or 600 msec warning intervals. Target eccentricity effects did not interact with age, and occurred only with a lower target intensity. Children defined as poor readers could initiate a response as quickly as good readers but were less able to maintain fixation-light fixation prior to target onset.     

The fate of ear asymmetries in short-term memory

Recognition memory for word lists presented to left or right ears was tested after filled retention intervals of 0-to 60-sec duration. Experiment 1 showed that the right-ear advantage (REA) for immediate recognition in dichotic listening does not occur after 10 sec delay. In Experiment 2, monaural presentation produced a nonsignificant REA which did not appear to be affected by delay. These data suggest that the REA for immediate report usually observed in the dichotic listening situation is a transient phenomenon which is based on phonetic encoding. The left hemisphere seems to be specialized for the initial reception of verbal information, but not for the storage or retention of such information over time.     

The effects of labeled and unlabeled praise upon lower and middle class children

This study investigated the relative effectiveness of two types of content of praise, labeled and unlabeled, with lower and middle class children. Following two brief observation periods designed to assess differences in the frequency with which lower and middle class mothers employed labeled and unlabeled praise, each mother played the marble-in-the-hole game with her child. Half of the mothers in each group were given labeled and half were given unlabeled praise statements to make contingent upon their child dropping marbles in a particuler hole. The results indicated that the children were more responsive to labeled than to unlabeled praise. The mothers from the two socioeconomic groups did not differ in the frequency with which they employed labeled and unlabeled praise in the initial observation periods.     

Task parameters affecting the efficacy of a visual imagery learning strategy in younger and older children

Second- and sixth-grade children were presented a list of paired associates (concrete nouns) either at a faster (6-second) or a slower (12-second) presentation rate, under either an instruction to generate an interactive image for the pairs or a no strategy, control instruction. The list was composed of two pair types: easy-to-imaginally relate and difficult-to-imaginally relate pairs, as determined from a prior norming study. At the faster presentation rate, 2nd graders were able to benefit from the imagery strategy with easy pairs, but not with difficult pairs. At the slower rate, however, they applied the imagery strategy equally well to both pair types. Older children benefited from the imagery strategy with both pair types at both rates.     

Comparison of two models of similarity judgment

The conventional multidimensional distance model of similarity judgment was compared with a new model in which component differences are weighted and then averaged. To evaluate the models, qualitative and quantitative predictions were derived from Romney and D'Andrade's (1964) componential analysis of American kinship terms, and these predictions were tested by having subjects rate the similarity (in experiment 1) and the difference (in experiment 2) between all possible pairs of 12 kinship terms. In both experiments, violations of qualitative predictions for both a simple distance model and a simple averaging model revealed that the componential analysis was not sufficient to account for the data. However the averaging model was able to account for the data when the dichotomous dimension of lineality used by Romney and D'Andrade was replaced by a continuous dimension of immediacy or closeness of kin. In contrast, no comparable elaboration under the distance model was successful. These results were discussed in terms of the likely psychological processes underlying similarity judgment.     

Behavioral similarity,confederate strategy,and sex composition of dyad as determinants of interpersonal judgments and behavior in the prisoner's dilemma game

The study was designed to test three distinct theoretical models relating player's attitudes toward a confederate in the prisoner's dilemma game: a reinforcing outcome model, a cultural norm model, and a social comparison model. A secondary concern of the study was to determine if player's sex, confederate's sex, and the confederate's strategy interactively influence player's choice behavior. Forty-eight male and forty-eight female subjects played 100 trials of the prisoner's dilemma game with a confederate who played either a 74% cooperative or 74% competitive predetermined strategy and then filled out the Interpersonal Judgment Scale rating the confederate. Behaviorally similar confederates received more positive evaluations than dissimilar confederates supporting the social comparison hypothesis. Further, the strategy of the confederate did not influence choice behavior in mixed-sex dyads, suggesting that sex roles may inhibit behaviorally based male-female interaction. The generality of previous gaming research which has dealt almost exclusively with same-sex dyads is called into question.