Discrepancy between angl head turn and loudspeaker location was measured on infants in auditory-alone and auditory-visual trials. Age and loudspeaker location had no effect on performance in auditory-visual trials. However, in auditory-alone trials, there were significant age differences. (PCB)

Studies investigated the development of children's ability to differentiate what they see from what they know in the context of conceptual perspective taking. Two developmental levels accounted for children's performance when they were asked about a naive observer's knowledge of the identity of objects. Perspective awareness training improved…

Compares comprehension monitoring skills of younger (five- to six-year-old) and older (eight- to nine-year-old) children. Subjects examined ambiguous and incomplete pictorial instructions for making two models and were asked whether they needed additional information to make the models. (RH)

Three experiments tested for developmental changes in attention to auditory and visual signals. Results showed that adults and seven-year-olds tended to allocate their attention to vision rather than audition when no precue was provided. While not entirely consistent, results with four-year-olds suggested a similar biasing of attention to vision.…

Results of a study involving 30 infants of 14, 20, or 26 weeks confirm the existence of distinct developmental phases of attention during the visual preference procedure. Findings suggest a refinement of the use of fixation duration as the major dependent variable in the procedure. (RH)

The ability of 40 children four and five years of age to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined in a kinetic imagery task. Results revealed that prediction accuracy was associated with the existence of orientation markers on the stimuli, as well as age, sex, type of discrimination, and several interactions among the…

Investigates the perceptual basis of metaphor by asking 5-, 7-, and 10-year-old children and adults to pair and discuss films of natural objects, both stationary and moving. Concludes that motion information makes metaphoric similarity relatively easy to perceive and influences the form of descriptive metaphors. (Author/CB)

The emotional impact of televised interpersonal dramas was investigated, with specific emphasis being given to age- and gender-related differences in children's spontaneous nonverbal expressive reactions. Participants were 27 female and 22 male children in three age groups: 4-5, 7-8, and 13-14 years. Facial expressions were unobtrusively…

Six experiments were conducted to investigate the sensitivity of one- to four-year-olds to changes in perspective that are occluded from view. Results indicated relatively early sensitivity to proprioceptive cues for changes in perspective and somewhat later sensitivity to appropriate visual-environmental cues. (PCB)

Assesses performance of 9-, 13-, and 20-year-olds on 3,840 trials of a mental rotation task in which subjects judged if pairs of stimuli presented in different orientations were identical or mirror images. Results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms underlying the impact of practice. (Author/NH)

Students in grades two, four, six, and college sorted abstract visual patterns that varied both in amount of contour and in type of visual organization (unstructured, simple symmetries, multiple symmetries, and rotational). Results suggested that children attend to both amount of contour and visual organization, but that attention to visual…

The incidental memory of young children was tested for words or words plus pictures that were initially presented under orienting conditions. These conditions required responses to acoustic or semantic qualities of the stimuli and an affirmative or negative response to the orienting questions. (PCB)

Tests the hypothesis that habituation of attention to irrelevant information can account for within-task improvement in selective attention--that children who are preexposed to stimuli that will later be irrelevant in a speeded classification task will experience less interference than children not given the opportunity to habituate. (HOD)

Examines, in three experiments, infant sensitivity at 20, 30, and 36 weeks of age to 3-dimensional structure of a human form specified through biomechanical motions. Findings are interpreted as suggesting that infants, by 36 weeks of age, are extracting fundamental properties necessary for interpreting a point-light display as a person. (Author/BE)

A stages-of-learning model was used to examine effects of picture-word manipulation on storage and retrieval differences between disabled and nondisabled grade 2 and 6 children. Results showed that disabled students are poorer at memory tasks and in developing the ability to reliably retrieve information than nondisabled children. (Author/RH)