bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Age differences in temporal monitoring and equal sharing in a fixed‐duration sharing task
Authors: Knight George P. , Bohlmeyer Elaine Morton , Schneider Holli , Harris Jerry D.
Published: July 2011

Previous research has demonstrated age differences in prosocial behaviours and has focused on the development of theoretically prescribed cognitive abilities thought to be prerequisite. However, the empirical relations between cognitive abilities and prosocial behaviours have typically not been large and there has been considerable inconsistency in these findings. The present studies were based upon an information processing perspective that assumes task‐specific cognitive demands for prosocial behaviours. In these studies, the effect of children's temporal monitoring abilities was examined as a logical prerequisite for the equal sharing of a desirable object within a limited time period. In the first study, age differences in equal sharing were partially accounted for by age differences in the temporal monitoring abilities of 5–12‐year‐old‐children. In the second and third studies, 3–5‐year‐old preschool children shared more equally when there was a reduction in the cognitive demands involved in temporal monitoring. In addition, in all three studies motivational manipulations consisting of either an instructional set or the friendship status of the participating peer influenced equal sharing. These findings support the proposition that the range of prosocial behaviours available to children is limited by the development of task‐specific cognitive abilities, and that the motivation properties of the situation also influence the expression of prosocial behaviours.
Drawing development in autism: The intellectual to visual realism shift
Authors: Charman Tony , Baron‐Cohen Simon
Published: July 2011

Normal children above 5 years old or so show a shift in their drawing development from intellectual to visual realism (the I‐VR shift). Some cases of individuals with autism have been reported who appear to have a mental age (MA) of considerably less than 5 years old but who are capable of visual realism. This raises the possibility that in autism, the I‐VR shift is independent of MA—that children with autism as a group might show precocious visual realism, independent of technical competence. This hypothesis was tested by giving three different drawing tasks to a group of subjects with autism who were not selected for drawing competence. On these tasks they did not differ from either normal children or subjects with mental handicap (of an equivalent MA)—they showed the I‐VR shift at approximately the same MA level (above 5:5 years). This refutes the hypothesis that this shift is independent of MA in autism. The existence of intellectual realism as a normal phase in the drawing development of subjects with autism is discussed in relation to Leslie's meta‐representation theory.
Preschool children's understanding of the relationship between modality of perceptual access and knowledge of perceptual properties
Authors: Pillow Bradford H.
Published: July 2011

Four experiments investigated 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds' understanding that different perceptual modalities provide knowledge about different aspects of the world. In Expt 1, children were asked to choose among looking, listening and touching as means of discovering an object's colour, sound or shape, and to choose which of two puppets, each of whom had performed a different perceptual act, could provide information about an object's colour, sound or shape. In Expt 2, children were asked to direct a puppet's actions or decide what they themselves should do to acquire information about a hidden object. Four‐year‐olds performed better than 3‐ year‐olds, but neither age group performed consistently above chance for all three object properties. In Expt 3 neither 3‐ nor 4‐year‐olds chose correctly between looking and listening, but both age groups correctly chose a perceptual act, rather than a non‐perceptual act, as means of obtaining information. In Expt 4, 4‐ and 5‐ year‐olds usually attributed knowledge of colour or sound correctly following perceptual or non‐perceptual actions, but 3‐year‐olds made frequent errors. The results are interpreted as evidence that 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds understand that know‐ledge occurs in the presence of perceptual access, but do not know which aspects of knowledge are related to which modalities of perceptual access.
Magic: Special but not excluded
Authors: Johnson Carl N. , Harris Paul L.
Published: July 2011

In three experiments, children's ability to identify examples of magic and their credulity towards magic were studied. In Expts 1 and 2 children were asked to distinguish between two equivalent outcomes: one outcome was brought about in an ordinary causal fashion whereas the other violated a familiar physical principle. Taken together, the two experiments show that children aged 3 to 5 years systematically judge the latter type of outcome as magical. Nonetheless, Expt 3 showed that some young children have a credulous stance towards magical outcomes. Having checked that each of two boxes was empty, children aged 3, 5 and 7 years were asked to pretend that one of the two boxes contained a potentially attractive entity (either a fairy or an ice cream). Most children could be allocated to one of two groups: sceptical children who mostly ignored the boxes when left alone, and insisted that it was empty; and credulous children who typically opened a box and acknowledged that they had wondered if the pretend entity was inside it. Overall, the three experiments show that most young children know what counts as magic but vary in their credulity.
Exploring the relation between preschool children's magical beliefs and causal thinking
Authors: Rosengren Karl S. , Kalish Charles W. , Hickling Anne K. , Gelman Susan A.
Published: July 2011

Three studies are presented which examine the degree to which children engage in magical thinking. We suggest that this is not a monolithic question that can be answered by a simple ‘yes' or ‘no’, but involves a number of different facets, including parental input, children's spontaneous beliefs and children's responses to magical events. Conceptions about children's beliefs in magical and fantasy figures were assessed by means of a parent survey. Parents reported that children believe in the reality of a number of fantasy figures and that parents encourage these beliefs to some degree. In Study 2,4‐ and 5‐year‐old children made a clear distinction between possible and impossible transformations of animals and did not invoke magical means to produce any outcome. In Study 3 children were asked if a magician could cause certain animal transformations. Here, the 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds made no distinction between possible and impossible events, reporting that for a magician none of these events was impossible. Few children said that magicians used trickery, instead suggesting that ‘real’ magic was involved. Taken together these studies suggest that children hold a belief in magic, but not an overwhelming ‘magical’ orientation.
Early rationality and magical thinking in preschoolers: Space and time
Authors: Subbotsky Eugene
Published: July 2011

The problem in this study was to determine the process of acquisition of some fundamental notions (structures) of space and time in preschool children. A fundamental structure that underlies the idea of space is the opposition between the permeability and the impermeability of a physical body for another physical body. A fundamental structure on which the concept of time is based is the opposition between reversibility and irreversibility of complex processes. In two experiments, children aged 4, 5 and 6 years were placed in situations in which they were free to reveal their beliefs in the permeability of a solid body (a glass wall of a box) and in the reversibility of complex processes (turning back into a little boy or girl again). The results showed that at the beginning of the experiment almost all the children denied that permeability or reversibility could occur in real life. However, under the influence of a fairy tale and an adult's instruction, the majority of 4‐ and 5‐year ‐olds revealed their credulity towards such unusual properties of space and time both at the level of practical actions and at the level of verbal judgements.
Children's judgements of ignorance on the basis of absence of experience
Authors: Robinson E. J. , Mitchell P.
Published: July 2011

In three investigations, 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds judged whether or not they knew familiar and unfamiliar named target characters. When judgements were made in relation to performance on a relevant task, children tended to judge wrongly that they knew who somebody was when in fact they did not know the person. Helping children to focus on their absence of prior experience reduced this performance‐related overestimation. These findings suggest that children's accurate judgements of ignorance are based on awareness of absence of prior experience. However, children who gave accurate judgements of ignorance without help appeared not simply to equate knowledge with prior experience: 4–7‐year‐olds who judged accurately that they did not know unfamiliar dog breeds did not subsequently overestimate their knowledge of breeds to which they had only limited exposure. Therefore, children apparently do not simply switch from using a performance‐based criterion in judging their own knowledge to an exclusively experience‐based one. We suggest that they may come to attend to the absence of a feeling of recognition when they are engaged in performing on a relevant task.
Changes in the content and timing of mothers' talk to infants
Authors: Broerse Jack , Elias Gordon
Published: July 2011

The content of mothers' talk to their infants (informative/eliciting acts versus non‐informative/non‐eliciting acts) was examined in terms of whether utterances were timed to follow their infants' ‘talk’ after a brief silence interval (alternating mode of temporal patterning), or to overlap their infants' ‘talk’ (covocalizing mode of temporal patterning). A total of 2827 maternal utterances in 39 mother‐infant dyads were collected at three‐month intervals over infant ages 3 to 24 months. The results indicated that mothers consistently timed informative/eliciting acts in ways that resemble conversations between adult partners (i.e. informative/eliciting acts predominated in the alternating mode), and that the relative proportions of these acts increased significantly during the infants' first year. Corresponding decreases in the relative proportions of non‐informative/non‐eliciting acts occurred in conjunction with significant reductions in the use of covocalizing mode, and this trend continued in the infants' second year: whereas at 3 and 6 months non‐informative/ non‐eliciting acts were predominant in the covocalizing mode, at 15 and 18 months they were predominant in the alternating mode. It is argued that such changes in content and timing constitute stylistic adjustments in mothers' management of interactions at the local moment‐to‐moment level, and occur within the context of global transformations in the dynamics of such interactions as infants' communicative abilities develop.
Children's narratives under different conditions: A comparative study
Authors: Spinillo Alina G. , Pinto Giuliana
Published: July 2011

Although narrative competence has long been regarded as an important linguistic skill, little is known about the effect of experimental variations on children's narrative capabilities. This study investigated developmental changes in story‐telling ability and how this ability is affected by experimental variations. The performance of 4‐, 6‐ and 8‐year‐old Italian and English children was compared in four story‐telling tasks. In a picture‐elicited story production, children were asked to create a story from a drawing (Task 1) and from three cards sequentially arranged (Task 2). In a free story production, children were asked to tell a story (Task 3) and to dictate a story to the experimenter (Task 4). The stories were classified according to levels of narrative competence and compared across ages and samples. The results show that experimental variations have a strong effect on children's story‐telling abilities. A similar pattern of development was found in English and Italian children although some differences in performance were noted.
Optimal mismatch for transfer of planning skills by slow learners
Authors: Todman John , McBeth John
Published: July 2011

Studies with mentally retarded children frequently report failure to transfer learned strategies. It is possible that, although the children can be guided to succeed on a training task, the failure to transfer is due to there being too great a mismatch between the task and their current unaided level of performance. This suggestion was tested by comparing the transfer of a forward search planning strategy acquired by groups of retarded childen when the mismatch between training and current competence was varied. In one comparison, two groups, matched on initial developmental level within the task domain, were trained on either the next or the next‐but‐one step in a developmental sequence. In a second comparison, two groups were trained at the same level in the developmental sequence. For one group this represented the next available step in the sequence, and for the other group it was the next‐but‐one step. In each comparison, although the pairs of groups required the same number of trials and hints to reach a learning criterion, only the group trained on the step adjacent to their current level of unaided performance showed transfer.
Visual realism in the drawings of autistic, Down's syndrome and normal children
Authors: Eames Kate , Cox Maureen V.
Published: July 2011

A group of 13 children with autism (mean CA = 13:4 and non‐verbal MA = 8:3) were tested on a wide range of drawing tasks. Their performance was compared with 13 normal children (mean CA = 13:4 and mean non‐verbal MA = 14:3), 13 younger normal children (mean CA = 6:10 and mean non‐verbal MA = 8:5) and 13 Down's syndrome (DS) children (mean CA = 16:1 and mean non‐verbal MA = 7:9). The children with autism did not perform any higher than their mental age controls on any individual task; overall, their visual realism scores were significantly lower than those of their chronological and mental age controls, although slightly higher than those of the DS children. It appears that non‐gifted children with autism do not possess any special aptitude for drawing.
The influence of gender labelling on preschoolers' gender constancy judgements
Authors: Johnson Ann , Ames Ellen
Published: July 2011

Criticism of traditional gender constancy assessment has focused on the unrealistic nature of the perceptual stimuli used to elicit gender judgements. Recent modifications of the traditional task have made use of more realistic perceptual information, but have also altered the linguistic structuring of constancy judgement requests. Subsequent improvements in preschooler performance have been attributed solely to changes in perceptual stimuli. This study examines the possibility that changes in linguistic structuring also affect performance in significant ways. Thirty‐nine preschoolers completed one of two versions of a modified gender constancy task; in one version pictured changes in appearance and activity were accompanied by gender labelling (approximating traditional tests). The second version was identical to the first except that gender labels were eliminated (as in recent modified tasks). Performance was significantly improved when labels were omitted. Implications for interpreting preschooler performance under modified task conditions are discussed.
Preschool children's genital knowledge: Does Bem's report of a male deficit survive replication?
Authors: Lloyd Barbara , Stroyan James
Published: July 2011

A replication of Bem's (1989) genital knowledge test was undertaken to assess the generality and reliability of her findings and, in particular, the demand characteristics of female experimenters. Following Bem, it was predicted that among preschool children, older children and females would have more genital knowledge than younger children and males. Significant main effects in the predicted direction for age and sex provide strong support for Bem's original findings. Possible explanations for the superior genital knowledge of young girls are proposed.
Childhood changes in speed of information processing and mental age: A brief report
Authors: Nettelbeck T. , Wilson C.
Published: July 2011

Measures of inspection time (IT) and raw Peabody (PPVT) scores obtained by Nettelbeck & Wilson (1985) from 70 children aged from 6 to 13 years were used to test predictions that, if mental age (MA) growth is mediated by speed of information processing, then controlling for IT (speed index) would reduce correlation between chronological age (CA) and PPVT (MA index) to zero; but the correlation between IT and PPVT would be unaffected by controlling for CA effects. The opposite outcome was found, suggesting that increasing CA mediates both MA growth and improvement in processing speed. Implications for theories about the nature of intelligence are discussed.
Number transcoding in children: A functional analysis
Authors: Seron Xavier , Fayol Michel
Published: July 2011

French‐speaking second‐grade children from France and Wallonia were asked to write down in the Arabic code, numbers orally presented at six successive one‐month‐spaced sessions. The evolution of the children's production (patterns of correct responses and errors) is analysed and tentatively interpreted through the model of number and calculation processing developed by McCloskey in adult neuropsychology. In order to evaluate their number production and comprehension mechanisms the children were furthermore submitted to other number processing tasks. It is tentatively concluded that the children's difficulties in the Arabic written task were localized at the level of the production of the Arabic sequences and that the regular pattern of errors some of them present is more easily explained by the lexical model of numbers processing recently proposed by Power & Dal Martello (1990), than by McCloskey's model (1992).
What makes strategic deception difficult for children—the deception or the strategy?
Authors: Russell James , Jarrold Christopher , Potel Deborah
Published: July 2011

Tests of strategic deception are normally assumed to measure children's understanding of mental representation and to demonstrate 3‐year‐olds' lack of such understanding. However they also make significant executive demands, namely: (a) provisional disengagement from a target object whilst (b) indicating a place where the target is absent. If these executive requirements constitute the core difficulty with strategic deception, young children should continue to fail such tests when there is no opponent to deceive but when the executive requirements are unchanged. Experiment 1 showed that removing the opponent did not affect the behaviour of 3‐year‐old subjects: they typically referred to the object location on the first test trial and often continued to do so throughout the subsequent 20 trials. Experiment 2 showed that the younger children's difficulty was caused by knowledge of the target's location not by sight of it. We discuss these data in terms of the possibility that there may be an executive contribution to the age 3–4 year transition in mental knowledge; but also caution that the role of executive factors in strategic deception should ideally be assessed by mechanical procedures.
An investigation into selective learning abilities in normal and attentionally disordered children using the Kamin blocking paradigm
Authors: Jones Steven H. , Callias Maria , Gray Jeffrey A.
Published: July 2011

Previous research is unclear about the ability of hyperactive subjects to engage in selective processing, although a failure in this system is a feature of the diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; American Psychiatric Association, 1987). In the present study selective processing is tested, by means of a Kamin blocking task, in 60 normal and 20 ADHD children. The Kamin blocking effect was observed in both normal and ADHD male children. Female subjects (all of whom were normal children) failed to exhibit the Kamin blocking effect. Reports of incidental learning studies have indicated that hyperactive children process information in a more diffuse manner than controls. The present results indicate normal selective processing in hyperactive children. It is suggested that abnormalities in recall strategies, rather than information processing, may therefore explain incidental learning findings. The lack of blocking in female subjects was not expected, a possible reason for this is discussed, which can be tested by simple alterations to the current blocking task.
Preschool children's ability to disregard meaning and focus attention on the phonological properties of speech: Some discrepant findings
Authors: Cardoso‐Martins Cláudia , Duarte Geísa Andrade
Published: July 2011

In the present study, preschool and kindergarten children's ability to disregard meaning and focus attention on the phonological properties of speech was evaluated through two different tasks. (1) The word‐size task evaluated the child's ability to compare the size of words, for pairs in which length of word and size of referent were incongruent (e.g. train‐telephone). (2) The word‐similarity task evaluated the child's ability to identify, between two different words, the one that was like a standard word. One of the words rhymed with the standard word, while the other was semantically related to it. The kindergarten children, who were learning to read, were able to disregard meaning and attend to the phonological properties of speech, regardless of the task. The preschool children, on the other hand, were, in general, more likely to disregard meaning and pay attention to the phonological properties of speech in the word‐similarity task than in the word‐size task. This discrepancy in the performance of the preschool children is interpreted in terms of differences in the type of phonological operation presupposed by the two tasks.
The role of familiarity and sound in the development of person and object permanence
Authors: Legerstee Maria
Published: July 2011

A cross‐sectional study investigated the development of search for objects that differed in animism (people vs. toys) and familiarity (mother vs. stranger, laboratory vs. home toy) in 37 infants at 6, 8 and 10 months. In different conditions, the objects either were (a) visible only prior to hiding, (b) audible during hiding, or (c) visible and audible prior to hiding, and then audible during hiding. Analyses of successful performance (criterion) and length of time infants took to reach criterion (latency) revealed the following. When infants were required to search for their mothers who interacted with them in a game of hide and seek, they performed better then when they were required to search for strangers or inanimate objects under similar conditions, especially during condition (c). The presentation conditions had little differential effect in search for inanimate objects or the stranger. Although performances became better with age, a substantial number of 6‐month‐old infants searched for hidden objects. The conditions facilitating search focused on intermodal information and a familiar social context. The findings forge important links between studies of object permanence, object perception and social knowledge.
Use of the availability heuristic by children
Authors: Davies Mary , White Peter A.
Published: July 2011

Two groups of children aged 7 and 10 years made judgements of the relative frequency of names and human and animal cartoon characters in a list presented to them. Children in both age groups erroneously judged the category containing the more famous names to be more numerous, supporting the hypothesis that they were using the availability heuristic.
The effects of a fantasy context, an obligation schema, and a rationale on children's conditional reasoning
Authors: Seier Wendy L.
Published: July 2011

Recent studies have shown that under certain circumstances, pre‐formal operational children can solve conditional reasoning problems that require looking for potentially falsifying cases. The present study teased apart the influences of fantasy context, an obligation rule, and a rationale, which typically were confounded in previous research. Subjects were 165 10‐ and 11‐year‐olds, who were asked to solve a modified version of Wason's selection task. Conditions differed with respect to the context supplied in the problem. Significantly more children in the fantasy than the non‐fantasy conditions gave correct anticipatory responses, gave correct global solutions, and were able to solve the problem quickly. Neither an obligation rule nor a rationale had any significant effect, unless presented in conjunction with a fantasy context. Results are discussed in terms of the important role of fantasy in discouraging reliance on empirical knowledge in reasoning about conditionals.
Attentional problems in the classroom and parallel processing ability
Authors: Wilding John
Published: July 2011

Thirty‐seven pairs of children, one member of each pair rated by teachers as having good attention with low hyperactivity and the other as having poor attention with high hyperactivity, were matched for age, sex and vocabulary score. They were shown a brief display of colours or shapes then probed for their memory for the colour or shape present at a specific location. The group with poor attention ability were significantly worse at this task but their inferiority was not restricted to very brief displays, contrary to the result of Giannoulis & Wilding (1992), nor were they affected more by delay of the probe. The group with poor attention were not inferior on a tone‐matching task. Results are discussed in relation to previous findings and it is suggested that the poor attention group may have difficulty in processing visual inputs in parallel.
Eliciting partial occlusions in the drawings of 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds
Authors: Arrowsmith C. Janine , Cox Maureen V. , Eames Kate
Published: July 2011

When asked to depict a partially occluded scene, children as young as 4 or 5 years normally draw two complete and separate objects (intellectual realism). The man‐wall hiding task is one exception, in which these children make more attempts at visual realism. Four‐ and 5‐year‐olds were given a standard task, followed by a hiding task and then the standard task again. Both age groups drew visually realistic pictures in the hiding task. The 5‐year‐olds but not the 4‐year‐olds were able to generalize their attempts at visual realism to their second attempt at the standard task. A second group of children who received the standard task, followed by another version of the standard task and then the standard task again, did not draw in a visually realistic way. In order to disentangle an explanation in terms of the notion of hiding from one based on the dissimilarity of the two objects in the hiding task, a third group of children received a dissimilar scene (but with no hiding component) between the two standard tasks. Most of these children did not draw in a visually realistic way, indicating that the notion of hiding conveyed in the hiding task is the main explanation for its success in eliciting visually realistic responses.
Processing modes of schematic faces in 5‐ and 10‐year‐old children
Authors: Bonthoux F. , Lautrey J. , Pacteau C.
Published: July 2011

Kemler Nelson (1984) reported an experiment (Expt 4) intended to demonstrate that the processing of categories evolves with development from a holistic to an analytic mode. Five‐ and 10‐year‐old children were asked to learn two categories of schematic faces which were either defined by a single attribute value or structured by overall similarity. As the identification of the children's processing modes was ambiguous, we replicated this experiment, with additional criteria to differentiate between holistic and multi‐attribute processing. Results showed that both the 5‐ and 10‐year‐old children used an analytic processing mode. The main developmental difference concerned the number of attributes on which their categorization judgements were based. These results can be related to the format of the stimuli.
Continuity and change in objectively assessed temperament: A longitudinal twin study of activity level
Authors: Saudino Kimberly J. , Eaton Warren O.
Published: July 2011

Because genetic influences may change across the life‐span, the finding of genetic influences on activity level (AL) at one age may leave some doubt about such influences at another. Previous research exploring the importance of genetic contributions to individual differences in motor activity across age have been clouded by subjective errors that may arise when assessments of AL rely on human judgement. The present study is a longitudinal extension of an initial study demonstrating genetic influences on mechanically assessed AL in 7‐month‐old twins (Saudino & Eaton, 1991). The motor activity of 35‐month‐old twins (37 MZ pairs, 16 DZ pairs) was re‐evaluated with motion recorders and parent ratings over a two‐day period. Despite a lack of phenotypic stability, mechanically assessed AL continued to show a genetic influence during early childhood (RMZ = .76, RDZ = .51). Moreover, the MZ‐DZ pattern for concordance on AL change (RMZ = .75 vs. RDZ = .52) was consistent with the presence of a genetic influence on developmental change.
Absence of mirror‐reversal tendency in cutaneous pattern perception and acquisition of a signed language in deaf children
Authors: Masataka Nobuo
Published: July 2011

When a letter is drawn on the forehead, it is often perceived cutaneously as a mirror reversal of the experimenter‐defined stimulus. The occurrence of this phenomenon was examined in 3‐ and 5‐year‐old deaf and hearing boys using a reliable behavioural technique that did not require verbal instruction. Hearing 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds and deaf 3‐year‐olds showed mirror‐reversal tendencies that were quite consistent with those reported previously in adults and 4‐year‐olds. However, this phenomenon was not observed in deaf 5‐year‐olds. The difference was considered to be related to the fact that deaf 5‐year‐olds were in the process of acquiring a considerable vocabulary in a signed language as their first language. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to possible explanations of the mirror‐reversal phenomenon and the characteristics of the acquisition of language by deaf children.
Sociometric types and children's intelligence
Authors: Czeschlik Tatiana , Rost Detlef H.
Published: July 2011

This study investigates the relation between intelligence and the currently widely used five sociometric types ‘popular’, ‘rejected’, ‘neglected’, ‘controversial’ and ‘average’. The sample consists of N = 5861 children belonging to 317 third‐grade classes. Intelligence was operationalized by a combination of three standardized intelligence tests and a combination of three ratings—corresponding to the three intelligence tests—of the pupils' intelligence by their head teachers. Results show that, regardless of the operationalization of intelligence, there is a positive relation between intelligence and ‘popularity’, whereas ‘rejection’ is negatively related to intelligence. For the other three sociometric types ('controversial', ‘neglected’ and ‘average’) no relation to intelligence can be observed. The discussion stresses the need to control the variable ‘intelligence’ in studies investigating the behavioural and socio‐emotional correlates of ‘popular’ and ‘rejected’ children.
Let's pretend: Casting the characters and setting the scene
Authors: Lloyd Barbara , Goodwin Roger
Published: July 2011

Video‐recordings were made of the natural dialogue of children during normal activity in a classroom at the beginning and the end of their first year at school. In organizing their pretend play, the children appropriated roles to themselves, assigned roles to others, designated objects as representations of something other than what they were, and established unified themes. During sessions in the autumn term pretence was established without invoking the verb ‘pretend’, although it occurred regularly in the summer term speech where it was used to appropriate roles, to assign roles to others, to designate objects and, in particular, to establish themes through scene setting. Interactional and linguistic developments underlying the acquisition of the verb ‘pretend’ are discussed.
Transaction of cognitive‐linguistic abilities and adult input: A case study of the acquisition of colour terms and colour‐based subordinate object categories
Authors: Mervis Carolyn B. , Bertrand Jacquelyn , Pani John R.
Published: July 2011

Data from a comprehensive diary study of early lexical development were analysed to document the acquisition of colour terms and the acquisition of colour‐based subordinate object categories by one child who learned all 11 basic colour terms prior to age 2:0 years. The pattern of child colour‐term production and adult feedback for colour‐term usage was recorded beginning with the first production of a colour term. Information concerning the child's non‐linguistic knowledge of colour categories, comprehension of colour‐terms, syntactic development, acquisition of colour‐based subordinate object categories and adult strategies of introduction of colour terms and colour‐based Subordinate object categories also was available. Findings support a transactional process between this child's cognitive‐linguistic knowledge and adult input.
The memory‐span deficit in children with specific reading disability: Is speech rate responsible?
Authors: Avons S. E. , Hanna Colleen
Published: July 2011

Memory span and articulation rates for one‐, two‐ and three‐syllable words were measured in three groups of 15 children: (i) children identified as having specific reading disability (SRD children), (ii) a group of chronological age‐matched (CA) controls and (iii) a group of younger normal readers matched to the SRD children for reading age (RA controls). All children had IQ scores in the normal range. The results showed that mean memory span for the SRD group was poor relative to CA controls, but approximately equal to the RA group. Similarly, the articulation rates of SRD children were slower than those of CA controls and approximately equal to those of RA controls. More importantly, mean articulation rate accounted for memory‐span differences between groups. The results suggest that the poor memory span observed in SRD children may be the result of slow speech rates. Possible relationships between reading ability, speech rate and memory span are discussed.
Children's discrimination of memories for actual and pretend actions in a hiding task
Authors: Roberts Kim P. , Blades Mark
Published: July 2011

Previous research has demonstrated that when memories are derived from similar sources children may have difficulty identifying the correct source of a particular memory. For example, young children who have carried out some actions and pretended to carry out similar actions may, at a later time, fail to distinguish which actions were actually carried out and which actions were only imagined. In the present experiment 3‐, 4‐, 6‐year‐olds and adults carried out a hiding task—they were asked to hide counters under objects on a table, or only pretend to hide counters under other objects on the same table. Participants were given a surprise memory test, five minutes or three days after the hiding task, to assess their ability to distinguish real and pretend hiding places. Contrary to previous research there were few age differences in the participants' ability to distinguish memories of real from memories of pretend actions — children and adults performed similarly. There was some, limited, evidence that all age groups were more likely to confuse real and pretend hiding places when memory was tested after a delay of three days than after a delay of five minutes.
Children's sensitivity to metaphorical expression of mood in line drawings
Authors: Jolley Richard P. , Thomas Glyn V.
Published: July 2011

The present study examines the development of understanding of metaphorical expression of mood in line drawings. Participants ranging in age from 4 years to adult were tested firstly on their spontaneous use of expressed mood as criteria for matching scenes, and secondly, on their ability to recognize expressed mood when directly asked to do so. Whilst participants of all ages could recognize the appropriate moods in the drawings, most children made their selections in the matching task on the basis of subject matter with only adults predominantly matching on expressed mood. This progression from preoccupation with subject matter to attention to mood is consistent with Parsons' (1987) cognitive developmental account of the origins of aesthetic appreciation.
Effects of age and achievement goals on children's motives for attending to peers' work
Authors: Butler Ruth
Published: July 2011

Children often look at one another's work, but it is not always clear why they do so. It was proposed that attending to peers' work serves both informational and motivational functions. First, such attention can provide information relevant either to improving one's products or to self‐evaluation. Second, interest in both product improvement and self‐evaluation may be guided either by strivings to develop competence (mastery goal), or by strivings to demonstrate superior ability (performance goal). Ninety‐eight K1 (mean age 5.10) and 196 grade 4 (mean age 9.9) Israeli children attending either urban or kibbutz schools were filmed as they worked on an activity in either a mastery or a performance goal condition. They then explained two of their filmed glances, one at an earlier and one at a later stage of task engagement. As predicted, the degree to which children gave product improvement or self‐evaluation reasons differed by age and stages of task engagement, since self‐evaluation reasons were more common at grade 4 and for later glances. In contrast, the frequency of mastery versus performance reasons depended on the experimental goal conditions and on the degree to which the school environment emphasized mastery learning goals (kibbutz schools) or performance learning goals (urban schools). Thus, mastery reasons were more common in the mastery than in the performance condition and among kibbutz rather than urban children. Children who gave mastery reasons displayed higher intrinsic task motivation. Implications for the development of social comparison and optimal motivation for learning are discussed.
Typical and behaviourally disruptive children's understanding of the emotional consequences of socio‐moral events
Authors: Arsenio William F. , Fleiss Karen
Published: July 2011

Twenty‐four behaviourally disruptive (BD) and 24 typical 6‐ to 12‐year‐old children were given two interviews in which they judged the emotional outcomes and provided rationales for emotions resulting from inhibitory moral, conventional, prosocial, and personal socio‐moral events. Children's emotional expectancies varied with the socio‐moral rule system and event participant (actor vs. recipient) being assessed. In addition, BD and typical children differed in some of the emotions and rationales they anticipated as outcomes. Group differences were most pronounced for inhibitory (victimization) and prosocial morality. Compared to their peers, BD children minimized the fear associated with victimization, and explained victimizers' emotions with more references to desirable material and psychological consequences, and fewer references to the loss, harm, and unfairness that victimizers had created. BD children were also more likely to attribute prosocial actors' emotions to the harm, loss, and unfairness that had been avoided, and to provide fewer references to the beneficial outcomes created for recipients. Overall, BD children were also more likely than typical children to select sadness as an emotional outcome. Discussion focused on the potential role of atypical emotional expectancies in perpetuating BD children's maladaptive patterns of socio‐moral behaviour.
The nature of the relationship between comprehension skill and the ability to tell a story
Authors: Cain Kate , Oakhill Jane
Published: July 2011

This experiment assessed the relation between children's comprehension skill and their knowledge about stories, as measured by their ability to tell stories from picture sequences or title prompts. To investigate the direction of any relation between comprehension skill and story knowledge, the performance of 7‐ to 8‐year‐old less skilled comprehenders was compared to that of two control groups: same‐age skilled comprehenders matched for reading accuracy, and younger skilled comprehenders matched for comprehension age. The main findings were that, although the groups did not differ in their use of conventional story features, such as beginnings, settings and endings, they did differ in the quality of the story structure they produced, at least in the topic prompt condition. Also, as predicted, stories elicited with picture prompts were better structured overall. In the easier, picture prompt, condition the less skilled group also performed more poorly than the skilled group, but not significantly more poorly than the comprehension‐age match group. These results demonstrate that the differences in the story knowledge, found between the same‐age skilled and less skilled comprehenders, are not simply the result of differential experience in reading comprehension. Instead, they suggest that knowledge about story structure may play a causal role in the less skilled comprehenders' comprehension difficulties. Possible sources of these differences are discussed.
On the transition from pretence play to reality: What are the rules of the game?
Authors: Golomb Claire , Kuersten Regina
Published: July 2011

This study focuses on the hypothesized boundaries that separate pretence play from reality by examining the ‘transition’ preschoolers make in response to a set of planned interruptions of their pretence play. The interruptions varied in the extent to which they violated an implicit set of pretence rules. Forty‐five preschoolers, aged 3, 4 and 5 years participated in two standardized play scenarios that were interrupted at four predetermined times. The results point to the nature of the interruption as the most important variable, and show that even young preschoolers can freely switch back and forth between pretence and reality modes of thought and behaviour.
English and Italian children's knowledge of European geography
Authors: Barrett Martyn , Farroni Teresa
Published: July 2011

English and Italian children's geographical knowledge of Europe was studied, particularly their landmark, configurational and route knowledge. The children were aged 7–11‐years‐old, and their knowledge of Europe was assessed using a variety of different methods, including verbal questioning, a categorization task, a physical arrangement task, an outline map task and a textbook map vs. satellite photo interpretation task. Convergent findings were obtained by the use of these various methods. In addition to differences associated with age, there were consistent and substantial differences in landmark and configurational knowledge between the Italian and English children, with the Italian children exhibiting a higher level of knowledge about Europe compared with their English peers. Sex differences were also found, but these were primarily confined to the children's configurational knowledge. It is suggested that the nationality differences may be due to the differential availability of information about Europe to children in Italy and England, with this differential availability of information itself being a product of the different social representations of Europe which prevail in these two countries.
Colour pop‐out in infant response to visual arrays
Authors: Catherwood Di , Skoien Petra , Holt Christine
Published: July 2011

In order to assess whether infant attention is drawn to discrepancies in the colour of items in the visual field, 24 infants (mean age: 5 months, 2 weeks) were familiarized over a series of brief exposures to visual arrays comprised of triads of schematic faces, with one of these (the target) presented in a different colour to the other two (the distractors). Greater attention to, and hence encoding of, the target item would suggest that infants use colour to segment or parse visual arrays in a manner resembling adult “pop‐out” effects. This was determined in regard to recognition of the colour and shape of target and distractors on a series of paired‐comparison tests. The only evidence of recognition on these tests was for the colour and shape of the target item, indicating that the infants had experienced colour pop‐out effects. A further experiment, with 24 infants of comparable age and using the same basic procedure as in the first experiment, examined the effect of doubling the number of distractor stimuli in the familiarization arrays. The only evidence of recognition in this case was for the colour of the target stimulus. These results are considered in regard to the question of whether the infants processed the arrays in a parallel or serial way.
Every picture tells a story: South African and British children interpreting pictures
Authors: Liddel Christine
Published: July 2011

A comparison was made between 80 South African and 80 British children in their interpretations of six pictures. Half the children were in their second, and half in their third year of schooling. Results suggest substantial differences in the way pictures were interpreted, and increased schooling was associated with different patterns of change for the two cultural groups. The children were not only interpreting pictures in different ways, but also seemed to be showing different developmental trajectories.
Theory of mind and social impairment in children with conduct disorder
Authors: Happé Francesca , Frith Uta
Published: July 2011

Children with conduct disorder show problems in social interaction. In a quite separate diagnostic group—individuals with autism—social impairments have recently attracted a great deal of research, with the suggestion that children with autism lack a ‘theory of mind’. This hypothesis has been successful in explaining many of the social difficulties these individuals manifest, both in laboratory tests and in everyday life. The present study investigated whether the social impairments in conduct disorder might have a similar root. Standard false belief tasks and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS), with additional items specially designed to assess understanding of other minds in everyday life, were used with eight normally developing children and 18 children with conduct disorder. The VABS documented extensive and widespread social impairment in this clinical group. There was also evidence of impairment in social insight, not dissimilar to that found in able individuals with autism. Children with conduct disorder were markedly different from children with autism, however, in terms of type of maladaptive activity. They showed more antisocial behaviour and very little bizarre (e.g. stereotyped, self‐stimulatory) behaviour. Implications for cognitive theories of social information processing in conduct disorder are discussed.