Facilitating cognitive performance in children: A comparison of strategy modeling and strategy modeling with overt self-verbalization

Children, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 10 years old, were randomly divided into three training conditions—a strategy modeling condition, a strategy modeling with overt self-verbalization condition, and a control condition. The subjects in the two modeling conditions were given training on four cognitive tasks, a signal task, a match-to-standard task, a paired-associates task, and a twenty-questions task. A 6 (age) × 2 (sex) × 3 (treatment) × 2 (trial) analysis of variance was performed on each of the dependent variables associated with each of the four tasks. The results of these analyses indicate that both modeling conditions facilitated performance on the signal and match-to-standard tasks for all six age groups. However, the two modeling procedures facilitated performance on the paired-associates and twenty-questions tasks only in the three older age groups. Since the two modeling procedures did not differ in effectiveness, it was suggested that strategy modeling without overt self-verbalization is the more practical and efficient procedure for facilitating cognitive performance in normal children.     

Self-focused attention and the placebo effect: Fooling some of the people some of the time

An experiment tested the hypothesis that mirror-induced self-awareness would minimize a “placebo” effect. Some subjects were led to believe that a drug that they were about to ingest would produce arousal symptoms as a side effect. Self-aware subjects in this condition subsequently reported experiencing less arousal from the placebo, and fewer of the side effects ascribed to it, than did less self-aware subjects. Discussion centered on the implications of these findings for placebo research and implications for two common alternative interpretations of self-awareness effects.     

Locus of control and the learning of an artificial language

An experiment was conducted to explore the cognitive processes associated with locus of control beliefs. Internal and external subjects were instructed to remember as much as they can from an array of 21 letter strings generated from a finite state grammar. Although internals and externals did not significantly differ in their ability to recall these items, internals were better able to discriminate grammaticality and nongrammaticality in a new set of letter strings. Thus, although both groups attended to the exemplars, internals extracted more invariance and hence learned more about the underlying structure than externals. These results were discussed in relation to those of Wolk and DuCette (1974) on I-E and incidental learning.     

The role of television in language acquisition

The conventional view among developmental psychologists is that television viewing does not contribute to a young viewer's language acquisition. That assumption is challenged. Evidence is presented that suggests that children can learn about language as they view television: (1) From age 2, children attend to television and view in an active, purposeful manner. (2) Some programs present dialogue in an attention-getting, content-redundant context. (3) Children can learn word meanings when viewing. (4) Children draw upon television as a source of verbal routines for their own play interactions.     

The development of sex typing: Themes from recent research

A conceptual framework for organizing the constructs and content areas included in research on sex typing is presented in this review of recent research on the development of sex typing. Two major themes are discussed. First, sex-typed play activities and interests emerge clearly in the first few years of life. Both play activities and peer preferences are sex typed earlier and more definitely than are personality traits and social behaviors such as aggression or dependency. It is suggested that researchers have underemphasized the importance of interests, activities, and peer associations while overemphasizing personality attributes as the core of sex typing. The second theme is that cognitions and concepts about sex typing are important in the acquisition of gender typing, but they are not sufficient by themselves for understanding the process by which sex-typed behavior is acquired. Children's sex-role concepts are sometimes related to their behavioral preferences, but other factors are also important influences on behavior.     

Languages and designs for probability judgment

Theories of subjective probability are viewed as formal languages for analyzing evidence and expressing degrees of belief. This article focuses on two probability langauges, the Bayesian language and the language of belief functions (Shafer, 1976). We describe and compare the semantics (i.e., the meaning of the scale) and the syntax (i.e., the formal calculus) of these languages. We also investigate some of the designs for probability judgment afforded by the two languages.     

A model of cognitive development across the life span

A model of cognitive development across the life span was proposed. A distinction was drawn between an individual's unexercised potential, which refers to the level of performance that would be expected if the individual had no exercise and/or training on the ability in question, and an individual's optimally-exercised potential, which refers to the level of performance that would be expected if the individual had optimal exercise and training. Both unexercised and optimally-exercised potential levels were proposed to increase with age up to early adulthood and decrease gradually thereafter. The region between the two types of potential, which was also suggested to increase during childhood and decrease during later adulthood, indicates the extent to which exercise and/or training can affect performance. This model was shown to be consistent with a number of different types of empirical findings.