Used a pretest/post-test control group design involving 44 female adolescent subjects to determine whether Moral Stage 3 subjects who have attained early basic formal operations are more susceptible to attempts to stimulate moral development than Stage 3 subjects who have attained only beginning formal operations and lack the cognitive…

Twenty-two preschoolers aged 48-63 months were observed and questioned by a familiar experimenter about their spontaneous helping, sharing, or comforting behavior over a 12-week period. (JMB)

Explores the hypothesis that there is a decline in operational thought ability in the elderly. Two samples of elderly males, with mean ages of 71.80 and 74.29 years respectively, were tested for their ability to conserve mass, surface areas and volume. (BD)

Four studies examined the cognitive bases of children's judgments of morality. Over 240 children from preschool to fourth grade were participants. Moral dilemmas consisting of information about a character's motives and the consequences of his actions were devised in such a way that the order, concreteness and imageability of information were…

Results showed that only 32 percent of adult female shoppers in a supermarket were able to use a proportional reasoning strategy to determine which of two sizes of a common item (size ratio 2:3) was the better buy. Performance declined when the ratio was more complex. (JMB)

Challenges studies supporting Kohlberg's claim of invariance in the development of moral judgment which maintain that subjects' preferred responses to moral dilemmas are based on higher stages of thinking. Findings indicate language rather than levels of thinking is a significant factor in subjects' response preferences. (CM)

Three experiments tested 3- and 4-year-olds' use of abstract principles to classify and label objects by shape or function. Findings indicated that 4-year-olds readily adopted either rule when instructed to match objects by shape or function, but 3-year-olds followed only the shape rule. Without a rule, 4-year-olds tended to match by shape unless…

Surface and relational similarity were examined in two experiments involving isomorphic and nonisomorphic analogical transfer, using direct-mapping and cross-mapping conditions. In the first experiment, third and sixth graders exhibited mapping based on relational similarity more frequently than did kindergartners; in the second, most four- to…

Three experiments examined the role of representations in adolescents' deductive reasoning. Findings indicated that, with age, conditional reasoning improved on tasks containing permission conditional relations; reasoning fallacies increased on tasks containing causal conditional relations. Valid conditional inferences were more common on problems…

Four experiments examined children's ability to reason about the causal significance of the order in which 2 events occurred (the pressing of buttons on a mechanically operated box). In Study 1, 4-year-olds were unable to make the relevant inferences, whereas 5-year-olds were successful on one version of the task. In Study 2, 3-year-olds were…

Two experiments explored the effect of linguistic input on 18-month-olds' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Infants were habituated to 4 support events (i.e., one object placed on another) and were tested with a novel support and a novel containment event. Infants formed an abstract category of support (i.e.,…

This study indicated that the school performance and intelligence quotients of associative responders diverge significantly over time from those of nonassociative responders. This divergence becomes greater with age, suggesting that reliance on associative responding in preference to reasoning may cumulatively interfere with intellectual…

Tested 63 kindergarten children on a spatial perspective task in which they copied the location and orientation of objects when the model and response spaces were aligned or when one was rotated 90 degrees or 180 degrees. (LLK)