Address given at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, September 1, 1969, in Washington D.C. Research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Dental Research, and the Office of Naval Research. (DS)

Category theory concept of a commutative diagram was used to construct a model of the way in which symbolic processes are applied to problem solving. It was shown that several different levels of thought can be distinguished within the basic model. Two experiments testing the theory are reported. (Author/RD)

Two experiments found that integration of facts alleviates interference only when a person can perform a memory task by making a consistency judgment and can avoid the need to retrieve a specific fact. People judge themes rather than facts: the more themes associated with a concept, the greater the interference. (Author/RD)

Studies of patients with category-specific agnosia (CSA) have given rise to multiple theories of object recognition, most of which assume the existence of a stable, abstract semantic memory system. We applied an episodic view of memory to questions raised by CSA in a series of studies examining normal observers' recall of newly learned attributes…

Theoretical and empirical issues relating to haptic exploration and the representation of common objects during haptic classification were investigated in 3 experiments involving a total of 112 college students. Results are discussed in terms of a computational model of human haptic object classification with implications for dextrous robot…

The conceptual categories that children have developed in their second year were studied in five experiments using object manipulation tasks. Subjects included 152 children from 18 to 31 months of age. These very young children had formed global conceptions of many domains of objects. (SLD)

Human learning may depend upon domain specialized mechanisms. A plausible example is rapid, early learning about the thoughts and feelings of other people. A major achievement in this domain, at about age four in the typically developing child, is the ability to solve problems in which the child attributes false beliefs to other people and…

Four possible mechanisms for short-term item recognition are distinguished. Manipulations of recency, particularly of negative probe items, provide critical tests. Two experiments were conducted using Sternberg's varied-set reaction time paradigm, coupled with procedures intended to minimize rehearsal and control the recency of probes and memory…

Two experiments examined the roles of semantic and surface information in reading and recognizing sentences. Results indicate that reading and recognition are interactive processes, involving conceptually driven and data driven operations; the interaction may be either automatic or controlled. Semantic and surface information are conceptualized as…

The water jug task model was extended to four variations of the Missionaries--Cannibals river-crossing problem. Different cover stories resulted in large differences in number of illegal moves, but no difference in number of legal moves to solution. The three-stage process model explains both legal and illegal moves. (Author/GDC)

Form-oriented errors of verbal inflection in speech are examined as indicators of cognitive processing in six experiments with college undergraduates. Appendices list words used as stimuli in the six experiments. (LMO)

Six experiments investigated loss of availability of surface form in sentence comprehension. Explanations for the loss included: (1) linguistic hypothesis; (2) memory limitations hypothesis; (3) integration hypothesis; and (4) processing shift hypothesis. (LMO)

Three experiments involving balance scale problems were used to characterize and explain developmental differences in three domains of children's thinking: existing knowledge about the problems, ability to acquire new information about them, and process-level differences underlying developmental changes in the first two areas. (BW)

The discourse interaction between adult and child was examined in terms of the content of their utterances, and the linguistic and contextual relations between their messages, in order to investigate how children use the information from adults' input sentences to form contingent responses. (Author/BW)

A new model is proposed for explaining children's performance on Pascual-Leone's test of M-space. The new model is used to generate theoretical performance curves for children at four different age levels and seven different levels of stimulus complexity, and it is a viable alternative. Differences between the models are reviewed. (Author/RD)