Developmental delays in cognitive flexibility early in elementary school can potentially increase vulnerability for subsequent externalizing and internalizing psychopathology. The first goal of the current study was to identify latent subgroups of children characterized by different developmental trajectories of cognitive flexibility throughout…

Representations of numerical value have been assessed by using bounded (e.g., 0-1,000) and unbounded (e.g., 0-?) number-line tasks, with considerable debate regarding whether 1 or both tasks elicit unique cognitive strategies (e.g., addition or subtraction) and require unique cognitive models. To test this, we examined how well a mixed log-linear…

In the number-to-position task, with increasing age and numerical expertise, children's pattern of estimates shifts from a biased (nonlinear) to a formal (linear) mapping. This widely replicated finding concerns symbolic numbers, whereas less is known about other types of quantity estimation. In Experiment 1, Preschool, Grade 1, and Grade 3…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

The present study involved 120 kindergartners, of whom n = 60 were followed up to first grade. Upon making inquiries regarding closeness in teacher-child relationships in the classrooms, the children participated in a laboratory situation in which they were exposed to computerized tasks. These tasks challenged the cognitive processes thought to…

Despite numerous studies, the link between verbal working memory (WM) and calculation abilities remains poorly understood. The present longitudinal study focuses specifically on the role of serial order retention capacities, based on recent findings suggesting a link between ordinal processing in verbal WM and numerical processing tasks. Children…

Change in strategies is often mentioned as a source of memory development. However, though performance in working memory tasks steadily improves during childhood, theories differ in linking this development to strategy changes. Whereas some theories, such as the time-based resource-sharing model, invoke the age-related increase in use and…

This study examined children's peer information processing as an explanatory mechanism underlying the association between their insecure representations of interparental and parent-child relationships and school adjustment in a sample of 210 first graders. Consistent with emotional security theory (P. T. Davies & E. M. Cummings, 1994), results…

This study is consistent with a model of semantic memory that assumes that the memory store is organized primarily into noun categories, and that the process of retrieving information from this store consists of entering the appropriate category as a first step. (Authors)

Twenty first-graders observed an adult model perform a quantity conservation task. The children were then tested on a series of generalization tasks immediately, after one week, and after three months. The results suggested that the social experience of observation appeared to activate a cognitive restructuring of the children's mental operations.…

Results confirm the hypothesis that identity and equivalence conservation require different mental processes. (Authors/MB)

Looked for evidence of an intermediate stage between the second and third stages in multiple seriation during which subjects seriate the material on one dimension and classify it on the other. Fine grained analysis of stages is considered useful in elucidating the mechanisms of progression through a stage sequence. (GO)

Explored the relationship between the emergence of operational thought and the development of taxonomic categories in 101 first-graders. Concrete operational subjects showed a greater appreciation than preoperational subjects for taxonomic relations involving atypical exemplars. (RJC)