Heider's foreseeability level of responsibility attribution: does it come after intentionality?

A conceptual analysis of Heider's level 3 foreseeability rule for the attribution of responsibility suggests that it is more difficult than levels 2 (commission) and 4 (intentionality) because it requires forms of reasoning ascribed to Piaget's formal operational thought. Thus, the rule should be acquired in early adolescence, or later. Previous studies showing foreseeability attributions in younger children have been confounded by the fact that their stimulus materials required an inference of intentionality. The present study, of 5-15-year-olds, avoided this confound by using an "omniscient narrator" technique to control the children's inferences of intent. The results suggest that children first employ Heider's commission rule, then his intentionality rule, and finally adopt the foreseeability rule at about 11 years. The study did not assess whether or not foreseeability attribution is a "stage" in the sense of Piaget's formal operational thought.     

儿童心理理论研究的皮亚杰理论基础

儿童心理理论发展的研究起源于皮亚杰对儿童认知发展的研究。皮亚杰的自我中心主义、道德判断、泛灵论、梦、模仿和游戏等理论对心理理论研究产生了影响。同时,也有与之不同的看法,如关于领域一般性与特殊性、心理表征的观点。“存大同求小异”,这应该是我们在研究儿童心理理论发展时对等皮亚杰研究的态度。     

Deaf children's use of beliefs and desires in negotiation

Although several studies have shown that deaf children demonstrated impaired performances on false-belief tasks, the children's belief understanding appeared intact when asked to explain emotions or behavior. However, this finding does not necessarily indicate a full-fledged theory of mind. This study aimed to investigate deaf children's negotiation strategies in false-belief situations, because situations that require negotiation provide a natural context with a clear motivational aspect, which might appeal more strongly to deaf children's false-belief reasoning capacities. The purpose of this study was to compare the reactions of 11- to 12-year-old deaf and hearing children to scenarios in which a mother, who is unaware of a change in the situation, threatens to block the fulfillment of the child's desire. The results showed that deaf children more often failed to correct the mother's false beliefs. In contrast with hearing children, who frequently left their own desires implicit, deaf children kept stressing their desires as a primary argument, even though the mother could be expected to be fully aware of these desires. Moral claims were used to the same extent by both groups. In general, deaf children more often used arguments that did not provide new information for their conversation partners, including repetitions of the same argument. The results were interpreted in terms of the special needs that are required by the hampered communication between deaf and hearing people as well as in terms of the ongoing discussion regarding theory-of-mind development in deaf children.     

The distinction between perceiving and memorizing in the presence of category cues.

The study proposed and tested 2 hypotheses to account for the claim by Appel, Cooper, Knight, McCarrell, Yussen, and Flavell (1972) that "memorizing and perceiving are functionally undifferentiated for the young child" by presenting preschool, second-, and fifth-grade children a "memory" and a "look" problem under several treatments in which semantic category cues were present. Surprisingly, preschoolers showed functional differentiation even in the absence of semantic cues--a finding interpreted as evidence for a functional differentiation in the young child's deployment of attention. Second and fifth graders also exhibited functional differentiation in the absence of semantic cues, and there were age changes in the facilitating effects of input and retrieval cues on children's memory.     

一项关于低年级儿童速度概念发展的研究

研究主动提供控制时间或距离一个变量恒定的问题情景,并考虑皮亚杰提出的儿童对速度具有“超越”的直觉,创设了4个难易程度不同的问题情景,采取访谈形式对59名低年级儿童的速度概念发展状况进行调查研究。结果表明：1．低年级儿童的速度概念具有位置决定倾向,幼儿园大班学生的速度概念表现出严重的位置决定论,一年级学生的速度概念有一定的进步,三年级学生的速度概念有了很大的提高,超过半数的学生从位置决定论中走出;2．低年级儿童距离概念和时间概念的发展存在不平衡性,距离概念处于优势维度。     

儿童科学学习的心理年龄特征研究综述

以皮亚杰的认知发展理论为立论基础,采用文献分析对儿童科学相关实证研究进行分析,旨在剖析儿童(2￣7岁)科学学习过程中普遍呈现的心理年龄特征,本研究同时发现儿童科学学习之心理年龄特征存有普遍性、稳定性与共同性。最后依据综合分析的结果及相关实证研究的启示提出教育建议,期能对幼儿教师进行儿童科学教育有所助益。     

Kid's stuff: the nature and impact of peer and sibling violence on younger and older children

OBJECTIVE: It is widely presumed that when children are hit by peers or siblings, it is not as serious as similar acts between adults or older youth, which would be termed, "assaults" and "violent crimes". The goal of this study was to compare the violent peer and sibling episodes of younger children to those of older youth in terms of their seriousness and association with symptoms that might indicate traumatic effects. METHOD: The study collected reports of past year's violent victimizations and childhood symptoms in a national probability telephone sample of 2030 children and youth ages 2-17. The experiences of 10-17-year olds were obtained via self-reports and those of the 2-9-year olds from caregivers. RESULTS: The younger children's peer and sibling victimizations were not less serious than the older youth on the dimensions of injury, being hit with an object that could cause injury or being victimized on multiple occasions. Younger children and older youth also had similar trauma symptom levels associated with both peer and sibling victimization. CONCLUSION: There was no basis in this study for presuming peer and sibling victimizations to be more benign when they involve younger children. The findings provide justification for being concerned about such peer and sibling violence in schools and families and for counting such victimizations in victimization inventories and clinical assessments.     

Differing views on context cues

The indispensable role of context cues has been acclaimed over the years by a great majority of reading experts. It is obvious, for example, that the resolution of the intended connotation of a word depends on the context in which it resides. Of late, the whole language approach to reading development has adopted the use of context cues as one of its basic tenets. Some recent experimental research has questioned the extent to which context cues serve as a means of written word recognition. This evidence suggests that observations that beginning readers depend heavily on context cues for word recognition should not be interpreted to mean that this practice should be reinforced in children learning to read. On the contrary, the modern evidence notes that able, mature readers recognize written words automatically, and thus make little use of context cues. Nonetheless, the finding that small but reliable gains in children's knowledge of word meaning is made through the use of context cues indicates that there is some limited place for instruction in context cues in reading programs.     

皮亚杰儿童规则意识研究的道德哲学解读

道德哲学和道德发展心理学存在互释的空间,本文应用哈贝马斯交往行为理论及其话语伦理学解读皮亚杰关于儿童游戏规则意识发展的研究,从交往关系的角度理解皮亚杰的道德建构主义,特别是儿童道德意识发展中的两种道德理想类型,辩明在哲学中作为理性事实的道德意识在儿童的道德发展中是通过特定交往活动尤其是儿童游戏建构出的理性能力.     

Order of information presentation and children's moral judgments.

It was hypothesized that age differences in use of intent information in children's moral judgments might be due to a recency effect in the judgments of younger children. A study was conducted to examine the effect of order of stimulus presentation on children's moral judgments. The information was presented to children, ages 4-5 and 8-9 years old, through stories with either normal information order, intent-consequence, or reversed order, consequence-intent. It was found that order has a significant impact on children's moral judgments. In addition, memory data were gathered which indicated that the pattern of forgetting was parallel to the pattern of information preference for the younger subjects. The findings suggested that younger subjects' relative neglect of intent in the normal order of information was based, in part, on their failure to remember the material correctly rather than on differential weighting of the 2 cues.     

The effects of object orientation and object type on children's interpretation of the word big

Previous research indicates that preschool children have persistent difficulty interpreting big: 4-5-year-olds typically interpret big to mean tall, and 3-year-olds fail to use any consistent interpretation. We propose that children's interpretation may vary depending on 2 contextual factors: type of object and orientation of object. 40 children (ages 3 and 5) each saw 35 pairs of items and, for each pair, were asked to point to "the big one." Type of object was varied by showing each child 3 kinds of objects: "people," "brownies," and rectangles. Orientation of object was varied by presenting objects either standing perpendicular to the tabletop (vertical condition) or lying flat on the tabletop (horizontal condition). Older children relied on height more consistently than younger children, all subjects relied on area more often in the horizontal condition than in the vertical condition, and 3-year-olds relied on height more when judging the bigness of people than of rectangles matched for size. Taken together, these results demonstrate that contextual factors clearly influence children's responses. These results demonstrate the interplay of cognitive and semantic factors in the process of semantic development.     

Why Talk about Mental States? The Significance of Children's Conversations with Friends, Siblings, and Mothers

Natural language data from 38 47-month-olds recorded at home in unstructured observations were analyzed and comparisons made of characteristics of mental state term use in child-friend, child-sibling, and child-mother dyads. Significantly more references to mental states were made by the children in conversations with siblings and friends than with mothers. Frequent use of mental state terms by both partners was related to cooperative interaction in both child-friend and child-sibling dyads and several associations were found with measures of language fluency, gender, and maternal education, although these varied across the 2 dyads. Children's use of mental state terms in conversations with siblings and friends was correlated with their performance on two false belief measures. Results highlight the importance of extending investigations into the social implications of the development of children's "theories of mind."     

Development of knowledge about the use of cues to aid prospective retrieval

Retrieval cues can be used to help one remember to perform tasks in the future and to relocate objects in the environment. However, in both tasks there are requirements for a retrieval cue to be effective as a mnemonic aid. For example, the cue must be associated with the target item, but it must not be ambiguous, and it must be appropriately placed. 2 studies assessed children's ability to evaluate the communicative quality of retrieval cues. In Study 1, 5-9-year-old children and adults evaluated the potential effectiveness of cues to remind themselves. In Study 2, 4-9-year-olds evaluated the potential effectiveness of cues for relocating hidden objects. Patterns of results were similar in both studies: young children first learned that the retrieval cue should be associated with the target and should be encountered for retrieval to occur. However, children often overlooked problems with the potential informativeness of the cues, such as ambiguity, and did not anticipate that such cues might be misinterpreted in the future. Children's difficulty in estimating their information needs may be related to their difficulty in monitoring their current comprehension state.     

Mothers' Perspectives of the Peer-Related Social Development of Young Children with Developmental Delays and Communication Disorders

Mothers' perspectives of children's peer-related social development were obtained from matched groups of young children with developmental delays, communicative disorders, and typically developing children. Structured interviews elicited information on numerous issues including mothers' views of the importance of children's social skills development, rationales with respect to why children succeed or had difficulties on specific social tasks, and the socialization strategies mothers employ to promote children's peer-related social development. Mothers also reported on their efforts to arrange play with peers for their child and the degree to which they monitored that play. Results indicated that mothers rated children's social development as highly important, offered primarily internal rationales (e.g., traits, dispositions) for success or difficulties in achieving social tasks, and endorsed moderate and low power socialization strategies. Differences across the three groups were minimal. Mothers arranged play with peers least often for children with developmental delays and communication disorders, but monitored play more extensively for children with delays. These finding were discussed in terms of mothers adopting a developmental orientation to understand children's social development and their implications for maternal participation in peer competence intervention programs.     

Children's use of nonegocentric standards in judgments of functional size

Dimensional adjectives are inherently relative in meaning, and so provide a test of children's ability to apply nonegocentric standards. The present research investigates children's ability to apply one kind of relative standard assessing the size of an object with regard to its intended use (a functional interpretation). In 3 experiments, children 3-5 years of age were asked to judge objects as "big" or "little" according to their function (e.g., a hat for a doll; a key for a door). Contrary to previous claims, the ability to use nonegocentric functional standards was present by age 3. However, 3-year-olds performed above chance only when their attention was directed to the relevant function, either by means of action (when actually shown how the objects fit together) or by means of language. In contrast, 4-year-olds performed well without additional action-based or linguistic cues. It is suggested that children have an implicit ordering in their interpretations of big and little, such that functional judgments are lower in priority than 2 other standards: normative (the size of an object is compared to a stored mental standard, e.g., a chihuahua is small for a dog) and perceptual (the size of an object is compared to another physically present object of the same type, e.g., a chihuahua 6 inches tall is big compared to a chihuahua 4 inches tall). Even 3-year-olds can make nonegocentric functional judgments of relative size, but the basis of the judgment must be unambiguous.     

Effects of Dialect on American and British Children's Spelling

Two experiments were carried out to compare the spelling of children who speak General American English and children who speak Southern British English. The first dialect is rhotic (/r/may occur after a vowel in a syllable), and the second is nonrhotic (/r/may not occur in this context). Young children's spelling errors reflected the characteristics of their dialect. For example, American children with spelling ages of about 6–7½ often misspelled hurt as "hrt" whereas British children of similar spelling levels were more likely to misspell it as "hut." Such errors were uncommon by spelling ages of greater than 7½. Even at these spelling ages, however, the British children made overgeneralization errors that reflected their dialect. For example, they sometimes spelled bath as "barth" based on the fact that bath contains the same vowel sound as card in their dialect. The results show that phonology plays an important role in children's spelling development.     

Young Children's Awareness of Their Mental Activity: The Case of Mental Rotation

From Piaget's early work to current theory of mind research, young children have been characterized as having little or no awareness of their mental activity. This conclusion was reexamined by assessing children's conscious access to visual imagery. Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were given a mental rotation task in the form of a computer game, but with no instructions to use mental rotation and no other references to mental activity. During the task, participants were asked to explain how they made their judgments. Reaction time patterns and verbal reports revealed that 6-year-olds were comparable to adults both in their spontaneous use and subjective awareness of mental rotation. Four-year-olds who referred to mental activity to explain their performance had reaction time and error patterns consistent with mental rotation; 4-year-olds who did not refer to mental activity responded randomly. A second study with 5-year-olds produced similar results. This research demonstrates that conscious access to at least 1 type of thinking is present earlier than previously recognized. It also helps to clarify the conditions under which young children will and will not notice and report their mental activity. These findings have implications for competing accounts of children's developing understanding of the mind and for the "imagery debate."     

The development of children's ideas about others' difficulties in learning

In this paper, Professor Ann Lewis, of the School of Education, University of Birmingham, reviews the literature and current research on pupils' perceptions of others' difficulties in learning. She focuses, in particular, on three strands: children's perceptions about other people and their traits; children as 'naïve' biologists, attempting to explain growth and development in others; and children's responses to and use of cues based on achievement and ideas about ability. In a wide-ranging discussion, this article explores work on theory of mind and notes the different ways in which children explain learning difficulties in others at various ages. In her conclusion, Professor Lewis makes three key points: there is a need to supplement experimental work in this area with good quality, classroom-based studies; more effort should be devoted to finding ways of accessing children's views and perceptions in authentic and reliable ways; and staff working in inclusive classrooms are ideally placed to contribute to the development of research in this area.     

学业不良儿童基本学习能力培养的研究与训练

学业不良儿童基本学习能力培养的研究对当前基础教育课程改革具有现实意义。只有提高学生的学习基本能力,学生在学习中遇到困难的种种表现都会得到缓解和克服。对学业不良儿童的概念要作出界定和分类,目的是确定学业不良儿童诊断的模式与方法,并在吸收国外对学习能力困难学生干预的基础上,提出符合中国教育实际的学习能力优化训练的新模式与操作方法,从而从根本上解决学习困难儿童存在的问题。     

Are working memory deficits in readers with learning disabilities hard to change?

This study investigated whether changes in the working memory (WM) performance of readers with learning disabilities (LD) is related to a general or domain-specific system. The study compared readers with LD, chronologically age-matched (CA-M), and reading level-matched (RL-M) children's WM performance for phonological, visual-spatial, and semantic information under initial (no probes or cues), gain (cues that bring performance to an asymptotic level), and maintenance (asymptotic conditions without cues) conditions. The main findings indicated that (a) CA-M children were superior in performance to readers with LD across initial, gain, and maintenance conditions, (b) readers with LD showed less change (as reflected in effect size scores, slopes for the quadratic curve) on both visual-spatial and verbal (phonological and semantic) WM tasks across gain and maintenance conditions than the CA-matched children, and (c) the performance of readers with LD was superior to the RL-M children's performance on initial conditions, but inferior on gain and maintenance conditions. Taken together, the results suggest that a general system moderated the changes in retrieval of phonological, visual-spatial, and semantic information in readers with LD.