Three experiments examined kindergartners' and second graders' retention in the context of two distinctiveness manipulations, the von Restorff and bizarre imagery paradigms. Results showed that: older children retained more information from lists of pictures or interactive images over 3 weeks than younger; younger children failed to benefit from…

Used drawings and questionnaires to investigate development of images of "a Jew" and "an Arab" among Jewish Israeli 4- to 15-year-olds. Found that preschoolers expressed positive biases toward the in-group and negativism toward the out-group. Early adolescents manifested mainly negative biases toward the out-group. Children in…

The authors investigated age-related changes in executive control using an Internet-based task-switching experiment with 5,271 participants between the ages of 10 and 66 years. Speeded face categorization was required on the basis of gender (G) or emotion (E) in single task blocks (GGG... and EEE...) or switching blocks (GGEEGGEE...). General…

Open-ended questions were used to obtain narrative accounts of what makes a girl (or a boy) popular (or unpopular) at school. The participants were 489 African American students in Grades 1, 4, and 7 recruited from high-risk inner-city neighborhoods. Appearance and self-presentation were mentioned the most in Grades 4 and 7. Prosocial…

Presents a study of paired-associative learning involving a total of 80 preschool and second grade children. Four familiarization categories of pretraining were utilized; results are discussed in terms of the effects of pretraining conditions and age on paired-associative learning and their consistency with some developmental hypotheses and phase…

Type and quality of nonfamilial child care were found to have no significant effect on peer social skills, sociability with strange adults, and child personality. The major determinants of personality maturity were background variables. Prior social skills and age were the best predictors of peer social skills. (PCB)

Investigates children's person-by-situation knowledge of probable causes of emotion in self and in others, and compares this to adults' construals. Shows that children can generate contextual explanations for affective states in self and others that are both shared by other children and adults and selectively related to different kinds of…

Reports on data collected in nine age ranges from 18 months to 71 months that examined children's ability to understand emotion-descriptive adjectives when used by adults and their own use of these words in productive vocabulary. (HOD)

Developmental changes in specific types of fantasy play and the relation of role taking, egocentrism, and receptive vocabulary were examined in two- to six-year-olds. Both frequency and duration of material and ideational fantasy play increased with age, but play patterns differed. Data suggest developmental progression from object to person…

Two experiments were conducted to describe effects of age and task difficulty on referential cohesion of story retellings. It was hypothesized that increased task difficulty would lead to higher error rates for all subject groups: preschoolers, first graders, and adults. Results indicated higher incidence of errors with videotape than with verbal…

Studies the gender-neutral use of "he" and "his" in first, third, and fifth graders and college students according to a modified version of a task developed by Moulton et al. (1978). Also uses a task involving a fictitious, gender-neutral occupation (a wudgemaker) to test third and fifth graders for possible effects of gender-related pronoun use…

A longitudinal, cross-cultural field study was made to determine boundary conditions under which the television violence/aggression relation obtains, to determine intervening variables, and to illuminate the process through which television violence relates to aggression. Children from first through fifth grades in the United States, Australia,…

Overt rehearsal and free recall performance was analyzed longitudinally in two experimental testing sessions at 7 and later at 9 years of age. Measures of short- and long-term memory recall, and two measures of input processing were obtained. Significant increases between age levels were exhibited by all variables except short-term memory.…

A total of 122 kindergartners, third and fifth graders viewed 30 pictures of familiar objects and interested on their free recall of the object names and their recognition of the original pictures. Half received instruction in adult recognition strategies, half in adult recall strategies. (MS)

Three strategies of attention were investigated in two dichotic monitoring experiments. Subjects were divided into three groups, 7, 11 and 20 years of age. (CM)