This study explored how toddlers' increasing social sophistication and increasing ability to coordinate attention between the social and object realm are reflected in toddlers' mastery play. A total of 57 toddlers (24 boys and 33 girls from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds) between the ages of 15 and 35 months participated in 7 mastery…

The concept of relational complexity is applied to explain the persistent difficulties of young children with theory of mind. Relational complexity has been found useful as a general cognitive complexity metric. Children must understand that the relation between an object and a person's percept is conditional on a third variable, such as a filter…

Relational complexity has been found to be an effective metric for cognitive tasks. The hypothesis that the greater difficulty and later age of attainment of hierarchical classification as compared to category induction are attributable to differences in structural complexity was tested. Hierarchical classification entails a ternary relation…

This study examined children's conceptions of authority in sexually abusive situations. It aimed to determine: (1) whether children's perceptions of adult authority in sexually abusive situations differed from their perceptions of adult authority in benign situations; (2) whether children's conceptions of authority changed as a result of…

This study was designed to determine the age relationships for each type of perceptual strategy used by nonconserving children during tests of conservation of quantity. The results indicate that the type of perceptual strategy reflected in children's answers varied with their age. (JMB)

This correlational study was part of an experimental project study on abused and non-abused children between the ages of two months and six years. Thirty-one children were administered the Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID) and the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (MSCA). To determine the extent of MSCA and BSID relationship,…

Lists symptoms of developmental difficulties and agencies that offer public services to exceptional children. (SB)

Six studies, with 174 three-year-olds in California, investigated whether children's knowledge of a label for an object excluded the possibility that they would accept another label for the object. Results indicate that mutual exclusivity motivates children to learn terms for attributes, substances, parts, and objects. (TJH)

The Cognitive Curriculum for Young Children, based on theories of R. Feuerstein, J. Piaget, and L. Vygotsky, uses a mediational teaching style with high risk children. The curriculum is teacher directed and emphasizes planning, small group cognitive instruction, large group cognitive experience, and summation of major activities. Evaluation…

Move sequence analysis revealed that, when presented with problems having subgoals difficult to order, 40 preschoolers between 45 and 70 months of age (1) tended to avoid backup; (2) were sensitive to incremental progress toward a goal; and (3) searched moves ahead for a goal. None of several indices of performance were reliably correlated with…

Describes a preschool program designed to correct problems at an early level in order to avoid the need for remediation later on. (GB)

Children were asked to judge the life qualities of a stimulus, justify their judgment, and judge again, after being given an anomalous probe. Analysis indicated younger children were unable to adhere to an original judgment when probed, while older children were. Results may reconcile previous empirical discrepancies in Piagetian research.…