Examines the relations of levels of task engagement to investigation and visual attention in data from 30-month-old children. Finds significant correlations between task and other mastery behavior. Postulates task engagement as valid assessment of mastery behavior. Suggests the motivation for young children's play is acquisition and mastery of…

Two studies tested college students on the Piagetian water-level task and several crossbar tasks. Performance on a disembedded crossbar task was better than that on the water-level task, regardless of whether the symmetrical nature of the crossbar was emphasized. Men performed better than women. (BC)

Tested the hypothesis that understanding of the pretend-real distinction develops earlier than understanding of the theoretically related apparent-real distinction. Found 3-year-old children consistently performed better on pretend-real tasks than on apparent-real tasks, even when the tasks were identical except for the distinction tested. (SKC)

Three-, four-, and five-year-olds were given problems to test their ability to recognize absolute number and relative order. Results suggest that children understand number as an absolute amount before they understand it as part of a progressive sequence in contradiction to the "ordinal theory of number." (Author/DST)

Five studies examined adults' responses to weight conservation questions which were constructed to give subjects a choice of two incorrect answers. The results showed that adults (1) acquiesced to the misleading implications of the questions; and (2) exhibited greater nonconservation in response to questions about the body than about external…

A comparison of the two leading indices of moral development, the Defining Issues Test and the Moral Dilemma Interview, was made using 215 subjects ranging in age from 12 to 25. Correlation between the two tests was low when age, socioeconomic status, and intelligence variables were partialed out. (Author/SS)

Empirically describes the relative development of perceptual and conceptual understanding of left-right, back-front, up-down projective relationships between objects and provides a heuristic model of the cognitive processes involved in coordination of perspectives tasks. (Author/ED)

Tested the hypothesis that some attempts to reduce the performance demands of concrete Piagetian operational tasks may have allowed children to solve those tasks with preoperational functions. Administered two previously used versions of the transitivity task for length and weight to 120 children six- to nine-years-old. The second version was…

The present study was conducted to examine the development of attentional and oculomotor control. More specifically, the authors were interested in the development of the ability to inhibit an incorrect but prepotent response to a salient distractor. Participants, who ranged in age from 8 to 25 years, performed 3 different eye movement tasks: a…

Reexamined the theoretical question of early childhood egocentrism by replicating Piaget and Inhelder's mountain experiment with variations to insure the age appropriateness of the task for 3- and 4-year-old children. (SDH)

Recent empirical findings have challenged Vygotsky's theory regarding the self-regulatory functions of children's private speech. This study hypothesized that semantic tasks and instructions to talk out loud would maximize private speech production. Results supported Vygotsky's notion that private speech does not disappear with age but "goes…

One finding is that the children in this study did not reach a level in the development of these concepts expected by Piaget of 9-year-olds. (Authors/CB)

Two experiments examined the effects of blocking of word lists (grouped by semantic category membership or randomly ordered) on the dichotic listening performance of second-and fifth-grade children. (CM)