The development of recognition memory for the left-right orientation of pictures

3 studies examined the development of recognition memory for the left-right orientation of pictures of common objects. In study 1, 5-year-olds, 9-year-olds, and college students were shown 20 pictures of objects. Subsequently, they were tested on their ability to discriminate between 10 of these pictures and their left-right mirror images and between the other 10 pictures and completely new ones. There were large developmental differences in memory for orientation, although all age groups could discriminate accurately between familiar pictures and completely new ones. In studies 2a and 2b, training concerning the relevance of orientation improved second and fourth graders' long-term memory for this characteristic, but training effects were minimal for kindergartners. However, even kindergarten children showed accurate short-term memory for orientation on the task used for training. In contrast to study 2, study 3 produced accurate long-term memory for orientation in kindergarten children by using a verbal training procedure. Results are discussed in terms of the range of memory factors involved in children's mirror-image confusions and in terms of general implications for the development of recognition memory.     

Irrelevant cues and shape discrimination learning by cats

Experimentally naive eats learned to discriminate a pair of objects (circle and triangle) that differed in external contour, with no irrelevant cues (N = 30), with irrelevant brightness cues (N = 26), and with irrelevant size and brightness cues (N = 26). In a second experiment, naive cats were trained to discriminate bidimensional patterns (circle and triangle) with no irrelevant visual cues (N = 24) or with irrelevant size and brightness cues (N = 26). Irrelevant cues did not significantly affect the rate of shape discrimination learning in either experiment. The findings disagree with the results of several similar experiments with rats.     

Children''s Use of Anatomically Detailed Dolls to Recount an Event

The use of anatomically detailed dolls in child sexual abuse investigations has raised several controversial issues related to important theoretical questions in developmental psychology. The present study was designed to examine some of these issues in a methodologically sound experiment. 80 3- and 5-year-old children experienced a social interaction with a male confederate and were later tested under 1 of 4 recall conditions: reenactment with anatomically detailed dolls, reenactment with regular dolls, free recall with visual cues, or free recall without visual cues. The children were also asked a variety of specific and misleading questions, some of them dealing with acts associated with abuse ("He took your clothes off, didn't he?"). Both anatomically detailed and regular dolls along with other props aided 5-year-olds more than 3-year-olds in recounting the event. To use increased rather than decreased age differences. Anatomically detailed dolls did not foster false reports of abuse. Overall, 3-year-olds were more suggestible than 5-year-olds. The findings have implications for children's testimony in child abuse cases and for psychological theories concerning the effects of stimulus support on children's memory.     

Beliefs About Social Skills Among Mothers of Preschoolers with Special Needs

Mothers of preschoolers with special needs (N = 280) were interviewed about their beliefs regarding the development of social skills. Children were viewed as below average in social competence, and social skills were perceived to be very important to develop but difficult to teach or change. Indirect, rather than direct strategies for helping children develop social skills were suggested most frequently. A belief in internal causation was more frequent than external; as hypothesized, internal attributions were negatively associated with the children's social-skills and adaptive abilities. Both internal attributions and low social-skills ability contributed independently to parenting stress.     

Longitudinal Consistency of Elaboration Scores

Sixty kindergarten, sixty second grade, and sixty fourth grade students performed several memory tasks under one of six conditions. The conditions differed as to the method of presentation of information. The study focused on developmental changes in children’s use of verbal, nonverbal, and spatial-positional cues for memory. The results, in general, showed consistent trends suggestive of a developmental change in representational ability, such that younger children tended to rely on visual cues and older children tended to rely on verbal cues to retain information. Children in all grades performed better when both visual and verbal cues were available and demonstrated an ability to utilize spatial-positional cues for retention.     

The effects of stimulus and task on preschoolers' ability to identify visual sequences

The effects of task and stimuli on the ability of 3- to 5-year-old preschoolers to identify simultaneously presented visual sequences was further assessed. A same-different task was compared to a matching task and familiar pictorial stimuli were compared to unfamiliar letters. Materials consisted of 3 element strings with 1 element repeated; both the standard and alternative(s) remained in full view on each of 25 trials. Older children performed better than younger children. The same-different task was easier than the matching task; this effect was not maintained when the differential effects of chance in the 2 tasks were removed. This pictorial stimuli produced better performance than the letters and also interacted with the type of error made. Reversal errors occurred most often in all conditions, but other kinds of errors were more frequent in the letter than the picture condition. This was particularly true for the matching task. The use of reversal errors to the exclusion of all other error types was associated with high overall accuracy on visual sequence discriminations.     

Enhancing Television Literacy Skills Among Preschool Children Through an Intervention Program in the Kindergarten

A study amongst 150 preschool children assigned to experimental and control groups indicates that an intervention program supported by systematic teachers' mediation can enhance preschoolers interpretive skills of television material, such as the ability to identify elements of fantasy in a television presentation in relation to special effects, the ability to bridge temporal and logical gaps, the ability to identify elements of camera work and their visual implications and the ability to make intelligent predictions based on inference from visual cues.     

Global-Local Processing in Preschool Children

The tendency of young children to attend to global and/or local levels of hierarchically structured patterns was examined using an orientation judgment task. 3- and 4-year-old children and adults were asked to judge which way an equilateral triangle was pointing under different contextual conditions. In Experiment 1, contextual variations included overall pattern orientation, configuration alignment type, presence or absence of an immediate frame of reference, and type of local element context. The results showed that, contrary to previous reports in the literature, young children, like adults, attend to both global and local levels of a pattern. Both pattern orientation and the introduction of contextual cues affected children's judgments, and the magnitude of that effect varied with the particular contextual cue present in the stimulus array. In Experiment 2, contextual variations included overall pattern orientation and presence or absence of an internal local level element. Consistent with the results of Experiment 1, young children's orientation judgements were influenced by the addition of local level factors.     

The role of stimulus salience in young children's ability to discriminate two-dimensional rotations: Reflections on a paradigm

Children's ability to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined within the confines of a mental rotation task. It was hypothesized that success would be affected by both characteristics of the stimulus and by the subtlety of the discrimination required. Forty 3- to 4-year-old children were directed to mentally rotate a stimulus a given number of degrees and to discriminate the appearance of the rotated stimulus from among a set of alternatives. Four stimuli differing in the number of visual orientation cues were utilized across 24 trials. A significant effect was found for number of orientation cues, and data indicated the difficulty children experienced detecting reflections, a task which bears close resemblance to the yes/no option in prototypic rotation studies. Children were only successful with a limited range of stimuli when discrimination of a reflected foil was not required. Results are discussed in light of discrepant findings about children's kinetic imagery ability and the advisability of using this particular paradigm with young Children.     

注重规范行为管理 培养幼儿自控能力

在推崇素质教育与赏识教育的今天,幼儿园应当高度重视行为管理,培养幼儿的自控能力和自我管理能力。幼儿园的行为管理,应当注重对问题行为的预防,通过对幼儿行为的指导,培养幼儿的自控能力,帮助幼儿建立自我概念、自尊和责任感等内在机制,使幼儿的行为受内部刺激的影响而不是外在条件的压迫,使幼儿进行自我管理。     

Children''s Understanding of Cognitive Cuing: How to Manipulate Cues to Fool a Competitor

4-6-year-old children's understanding of cognitive cuing was studied in 2 experiments using a strategic interaction paradigm. Children could fool a competitor by hiding targets in locations that were labeled with semantically weakly associated cues and help a cooperative partner by hiding them in semantically highly associated locations. Very few 4-year-olds, half the 5-year-olds, and almost all 6-years-olds appropriately chose semantically highly vs. weakly associated hiding places to make the targets easy vs. difficult to find. The second experiment showed that 4-year-olds did not strategically manipulate cues as sources of information, although they themselves proficiently used them as such in a search task. These findings are discussed with regard to research on children's developing understanding of origins of knowledge and belief and with regard to recent claims that young preschoolers possess a metacognitive understanding of cognitive cuing.     

Preschoolers' Ability to Adopt Justice and Care Orientations to Moral Dilemmas

This study examined the moral reasoning that preschoolers use in resolving moral dilemmas. Children's resolutions and justifications were examined with regard to their care orientation and their justice orientation. Thirty-one preschool children participated in the study (18 girls, 13 boys). Children were each read 4 stone containing moral dilemmas and were asked to resolve these dilemmas. The results indicated that children's answers revealed a care orientation or a justice orientation with equal frequency. At times, children could even accept both orientations to the same dilemma. The data analysis also revealed no gender differences in moral orientation. Results are discussed in terms of children's social-cognitive abilities. Educational implications are also raised.     

Epistemic states and traits: preschoolers appreciate the differential informativeness of situation-specific and person-specific cues to knowledge

Previous research has demonstrated that preschoolers can use situation-specific (e.g., visual access) and person-specific (e.g., prior accuracy) cues to infer what others know. The present studies investigated whether 4- and 5-year-olds appreciate the differential informativeness of these types of cues. In Experiment 1 (N = 50), children used others' prior labeling accuracy as a cue when learning labels for, but not the visual identity of, hidden objects. In Experiment 2 (N = 64), with both cues present, children attended more to visual access than prior accuracy when learning the visual identity of, but not labels for, hidden objects. These findings demonstrate that children appreciate the difference between situation- and person-specific cues and flexibly evaluate these cues depending on what information they are seeking.     

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.     

An information-processing analysis of children's accuracy in predicting the appearance of rotated stimuli

Children's ability to discriminate reflections and rotations of visual stimuli was examined using a kinetic imagery task. It was hypothesized that success would be related to the number and placement of orientation markers on the stimuli, as well as whether or not reflections had to be discriminated from simple rotations. 40 4- and 5-year-old children were directed to imagine how a stimulus would look if rotated to a specified location and asked to indicate the appearance of the reoriented stimulus by selecting the correct option from a number of foils. 48 of the items required only discrimination of a reoriented stimulus. The other 48 also required discrimination of a reflection of the reoriented stimulus. Stimuli differed in the number of orientation cues on the edges of the figures. 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 variables. Findings were discussed in comparison to a priori predictions based on an analysis of how children might use orientation information when performing mental rotation tasks.     

Visual discrimination learning and memory in nocturnal prosimians

The ability of two nocturnal prosimians—greater galago and slow loris—to learn and to remember two-dimensional black-white pattern discriminations was investigated. There was no significant species difference. Both were found to be: sensitive to the number of visual cues available, able to benefit from repeated exposure to similar problems, capable of retaining previously learned material over a long period of time. Although they are individually quite variable in performance, these primitive primates are by no means untrainable on visual discrimination problems, as previous reports have suggested.     

Identification of Alcohol by Smell among Preschoolers: Evidence for Early Socialization about Drugs Occurring in the Home

This study tested preschoolers' ability to provide accurate verbal associations to alcoholic beverage odors and whether this ability was related to parental drinking patterns and motivations. Older preschoolers performed better than younger preschoolers; photographic cues improved performance; children who correctly identified a substance by smell had socially appropriate knowledge of the culturally appropriate users of the substance; children reported liking substances that are used mainly by children and adults, and generally reported disliking substances whose use is legally limited to adults only; children were better at identifying substances they commonly use, but success at recognition of alcoholic beverages was related to heavier parental drinking and use of alcohol for escape reasons. Findings have implications for theories of socialization to drug use and for models of prevention.     

Preschoolers' Understanding of Plan and Oblique Maps: The Role of Geometric and Representational Correspondence

To study conditions that affect preschoolers' understanding of maps, we asked 4-and 5-year-olds to place stickers on classroom maps to show locations of objects currently in view. Varied were vantage point (eye level vs. raised oblique), map form (plan vs. oblique), and item type (floor vs. furniture locations). Even though they were working with maps of a familiar referent space, preschoolers evidenced difficulty. While an oblique vantage point did not enhance performance, using the oblique map first aided subsequent performance on the plan map. As predicted, performance on floor locations was worse than on furniture locations. Findings are discussed in relation to performance by adults given the mapping task and preschoolers given a nonreferential sticker placement task. Data suggest the importance of ( a ) iconicity and ( b ) studying geometric as well as representational correspondences in map research.     

Factors affecting conditional discrimination learning by pigeons: II. Physical and temporal characteristics of stimuli

Four experiments were performed to determine the stimulus characteristics that favor the development of conditional stimulus control in the single reversal paradigm with pigeon subjects. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained on a successive discrimination between tone frequencies ranging from 350 to 3500 Hz in a particular houselight context condition (houselight-on or -off). The subjects then were trained on the reversal of the tone discrimination in the alternative context. Subsequent tone-frequency generalization testing in the two contexts indicated that they had failed to gain conditional control over the pigeons’ discriminative performance. Such control was obtained in Experiment 2, in which the two problems were alternated daily for 32 sessions of training. The gradients then peaked at the appropriate S+ value in each context. In Experiment 3, the key colors (blue vs. red) served as contexts while pigeons learned a successive discrimination in which the discriminative cues were houselight-on versus houselight-off conditions. This was followed by a reversal of the discrimination in the alternative key-color context condition. The key colors were effective conditional cues in this situation. In a previous experiment (Thomas, McKelvie, & Mah, 1985), key color had been ineffective as a conditional cue when the discriminative cues were lines superimposed on the colored background. In Experiment 4, key color was effective when the color and lines were presented on a single key as in the earlier experiment, but were sequenced such that the onset of the key color preceded and then overlapped the presentation of the lines. We concluded that conditional discriminations are easiest for pigeons when visual cues are used, but the conditional and discriminative cues must be presented in such a way that they do not combine to form a psychological compound.