Explores age and classroom differences in children's awareness of teacher expectations and in the relation between awareness and self-expectations. (PCB)

Compares second-, fifth- and eighth-graders' reasoning about their relative ability and that of another child (who applied more or less effort) with their reasoning about the relative ability of two others (who differed in effort). Responses to specific questions may be more sensitive to situationally induced motivational influences than responses…

The normative rule began to predominate at age 10 and was the only rule employed by 13-year-olds. In contrast, almost all 7-year-olds simplified the equalization task to an ordinal level. Four different nonalgebraic rules were identified. Neither young children's tendency to simplify nor older children's capacity to quantify could be detected in…

One experiment examined two and one-half, three and one-half and four and one-half year olds' ability to conduct nonredundant comprehensive searches of small lidded trash cans. A second experiment examined three , four, and five year olds' ability to find Easter eggs hidden on a large playground. Results were discussed in relation to developmental…

Two naming tasks were simultaneously presented to either one visual field/hemisphere combination or were divided between visual fields/hemispheres. Hypotheses that bilateral presentation would improve performance by insulating conflicting tasks from mutual interference and that there would be a developmental shift in the bilateral advantage was…

Preschool children judged the larger of pairs of stimuli. Three-year olds responded with above-chance accuracy, while 4- and 5-year olds defined "big" as "tall." (ST)

The effects of high-structure versus low-structure objects on various types and components of pretend play were examined in a sample of 36 low-income, predominantly Afro-American preschoolers. High-structure objects increased the frequency of noninteractive pretend play in three and one-half-year-old triads, but not in five-year-old triads.…

Investigates the ability of four-, seven-, and ten-month-old infants to perceive and base novelty responses on correlations among perceptual attributes in a category-like context. In a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, ten-month-old infants clearly responded on the basis of the correlation among attributes, while four- and seven-month-old…

Seventy-six children ages four to eight were tested first in a reward-allocation task in which they had to divide a reward between two stimulus characters painting a fence. The characters differed in painting abilities, effort put into the job, and amount of fence painted. Then the same children's understanding of causal relationships among…

Two experiments tested the effectiveness of familiar size as information for perceiving distance. In the first experiment, under monocular viewing conditions, adults judged the distances to large and small photographs of faces and to large and small checkerboard ovals equal to the faces in size. In the second, the same displays were presented to…

Infants five- and seven-months-old were sequentially shown three stimulus arrays of visual elements, only one of which was capable of producing subjective contours. An infant habituation control procedure was used to test infants' abilities to discriminate the arrays. (Author/RH)