The ability to evaluate the quality of explanations is an essential part of children's intellectual growth. Explanations can be faulty in structural ways such as when they are circular. A circular explanation reiterates the question as if it were an explanation rather than providing any new information. Two experiments (N=77) examined children's…

Piaget (1932) and subsequent researchers have reported that young children's moral judgments are based more on the outcomes of actions than on the agents' intentions. The current study investigated whether negligence might also influence these judgments and explain children's apparent focus on outcome. Children (3-8 years of age) and adults (N =…

Four experiments examined the prominence of place and action representation in the story representations of second-, fifth-, and sixth-grade children and college students. Results suggested that place inconsistency is more important than action inconsistency in children's judgments of story adequacy except when the action involves the story theme.…

Findings on 20 children who passed an area conservation task and 20 who didn't suggested that conserving children applied an additive rule, while nonconserving children presented patterns suggesting centration on one of the two dimensions. Implications for Anderson's and Piaget's conceptions of conservation development are discussed. (RH)

Investigated the influence of age and artistic inclination on the use of articulation and line quality in judging similarity and preference for simple human drawings. Children aged 4, 5, 10, and 13 years revealed articulation to be the primary criterion in similarity judgments. Preference patterns differed somewhat by age. (SKC)

Examines ways in which young children's decision making is affected by decision reversibility and decision importance. Results suggest that even young children are affected by manipulations of the decision situation, and that basic decision processes develop rapidly with age. (SKC)

Uses the balance scale task to assess the development of compensation across versions of the task. Shows that fully reversible thinking may not be typical even in college students; many subjects used the compensation operation inconsistently. Preschoolers tended to use the given information in a way that was opposite to that required for correct…

Notes that fuzzy-trace theory has been used to understand false memories of children. Demonstrates the irony imbedded in the theory, maintaining that a central implication of fuzzy-trace theory is that some errors characterized as false memories are not really false at all. These errors, when applied to false alarms to related lures, are best…

Used single-subject analyses to examine the developmental difficulty of the ulterior motive question (the backward inverse inference) in five- and seven-year-olds. Results suggest that children's difficulties with ulterior motive information result both from the abstract nature and the logical form of the task. (Author/SKC)

Presents a unified theoretical approach to children's false-memory reports that deals with both spontaneous and implanted reports. Details false recognition and misinformation models that allow researchers to determine the impact of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, and similarity judgment in false memory reports. (LBT)

Notes that there has been far less mathematical modeling of children's memory than of adults' memory. Explores the flaw in fuzzy-trace model, and maintains that situations in which partial verbatim information is used along with partial gist information fall outside the boundary of this type of model. Suggests refining the concepts of and…

Notes that a multitude of studies have demonstrated that misleading postevent information affects people's memories. Contents that the fuzzy-trace theory is a positive step toward understanding the malleability of memory. Discusses fuzzy-trace theory in terms of three primary areas of study: altered response format, maximized misinformation…

Notes that spontaneous false memories are a routine part of everyday memory and more common than implanted false memory. Commends the fuzzy-trace theory for the separation and explanation of these two sources of inaccuracy. Demonstrates the theory's handling of three phenomena concerning the creation and maintenance of false memories. (LBT)

Notes that fuzzy-trace theory provides a link between indices of memory performance and the theoretical processes that underlie that performance. Author argues false memories can arise because of processes that normally affect forgetting. Maintains that, to the extent that memories lose their distinctive properties, such memories may become…

Suggests that fuzzy-trace theory may replace dominant metaphors of cognitive development. Discusses theoretical climate of the 1980s when the theory was first formulated. Describes how, by integrating new ideas about how cognitive development was viewed into a coherent framework, the theory slowly gained acceptance as critical aspects of it were…