Older adults are significantly slower than young adults in the naming response in the Stroop Color Word Interference Test. Hypotheses attempting to explain this age-related difference in a perceptual-cognitive task have included orthogenic principle, response-competition, and cautiousness. This study examines whether there are any significant…

Tasks based on the function concept (y = f(x)) were used in a study charting the development of anticipation in children from 5 through 7 years of age. In each task a desired outcome was a function of a combination of specific, rule-constrained, antecedent conditions. Subjects' behavior was scored according to criteria differentiating six levels…

Discussed are data concerning a simple visuomotor tracking task, especially the expectations and cognitive representations involved in performing such a task. The task consisted in tracking the horizontal displacement of a target spot on the screen by appropriate forearm rotations. Each subject participated in two sessions: first, at a .8 Hz…

Age-related deficits may exist in episodic memory (knowledge of the context in which an item appeared previously) and semantic memory (knowledge of an item's meaning independent of the context). In order to examine adult age differences in semantic priming effects and subsequent episodic retention for visually presented words, 24 young (18-22…

Research has suggested that memory performance may be related to the extent of stimulus processing during acquisition. To examine processing efficiency and processing deficiency differences between younger and older adults, four studies were conducted. In the first study, young and old adults rated word lists, manipulated for generation specific…

Divorce can be viewed as a multi-faceted, interactive process which represents a dislocation in the life cycle of a family. A set of critical developmental tasks must be met and mastered for a family to cope with the transition through the divorce experience. The first of these developmental challenges facing the children of divorcing parents is…

To investigate the development of children's knowledge of the intension and extension of four natural concepts (cup, scissors, money, and musical instrument), three questions were explored in an experiment involving one-hundred-and-twenty 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children (40 children for each age group). Extension was measured in a verbal labeling…

Developmental changes in preschool children's awareness of the relative effectiveness of four nonverbal strategies in a memory-for-location task were investigated. Fifty-two preschool children (12 three-year-olds, 20 four-year-olds, and 20 five-year-olds) made paired comparison judgments as to the mnemonic effectiveness of marking, touching,…

Fifty-six Dutch school children (aged 6-0 to 14-4 years) participated in a study designed to investigate their ability to reason with logical implication. They answered a total of 32 reasoning problems. Before or after each question they were asked a class inclusion question. A high degree of correspondence was found between class inclusion and…

A systematic relationship between self-report and perceived sexuality ratings seems to be more characteristic of males than of females. To further investigate this phenomena, male (N=48) and female (N=82) subjects, from 17 to 79 years old, provided self-report sexuality ratings and perceived sexuality ratings of male and female target groups of…

In this study of how children select content to use in producing stories, the information children knew about three problem-solving situations was compared to the information they included in their stories about these situations. Twenty children at each of three age levels (6, 9, and 12 years) were interviewed individually. Within each age group,…

This research study was designed to present some comparative data on the Teenage Nonviolence Test (TNT) across grades and across gender. The sample for this descriptive study included a total of 837 seventh through twelfth graders from the rural northwestern section of the United States. Girls were significantly more nonviolent than boys for all…

The implications of three concepts from cognitive science for understanding of cognitive development are reviewed. These are (1) learning (and induction), (2) analogy, and (3) capacity. A model of analogical reasoning is discussed that specifies changes in representations over age that explain phenomena previously thought to be stage-related. (SLD)

This study explored children's development of a "mental time line" and considered the propositions that younger children view the temporal domain as bi-polar, while older children display signs of using finer gradations on their mental time ruler that approach conventional structures of clock and calendar time. Subjects were a group of…

Features of everyday conceptions of a "wise person" were examined, based on a model of wisdom-related knowledge (Baltes & Smith, 1990). The goal was to examine whether the psychological theory underlying this model is consistent with lay conceptions of wisdom, and whether everyday conceptions contain additional features not contained…