Developmental Psychology

Leavens, David A.; Hopkins, William D.

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.813pmid: N/A

This study describes the use of referential gestures with concomitant gaze orienting behavior to both distal food objects and communicative interactants by 115 chimpanzees, ranging from 3 to 56 years of age. Gaze alternation between a banana and an experimenter was significantly associated with vocal and gestural communication. Pointing was the most common gesture elicited; 47 subjects pointed with the whole hand, whereas 6 subjects pointed with index fingers. Thus, communicative pointing is commonly used by laboratory chimpanzees, without explicit training to point, language training, or home rearing. Juveniles exhibited striking decrements in their propensity to communicate with adult male experimenters compared with older chimpanzees. Significantly fewer mother-reared chimpanzees exhibited gaze alternation compared with nursery-reared chimpanzees.

Diesendruck, Gil; Gelman, Susan A.; Lebowitz, Kim

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.823pmid: N/A

Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information and perceptual similarity on preschoolers’ interpretations of labels. In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds were less likely to interpret 2 labels for animals as referring to mutually exclusive categories: when the animals were said to share internal, rather than superficial, properties and when the animals were perceptually similar rather than dissimilar. In Study 2, neither internal nor functional property information influenced 4-year-olds’ interpretations of labels for artifacts. Studies 3 and 4 provide baseline data, demonstrating that the domain differences were not due to prior differences in children's lexical knowledge in the 2 domains. These results suggest that children have essentialist beliefs about animals, but not about artifacts, and that these beliefs interact with children's assumptions about word meaning in determining their interpretations of labels.

Smith, Linda B.; Quittner, Alexandra L.; Osberger, Mary Joe; Miyamoto, Richard

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.840pmid: N/A

This study examined the development of visual attention in 5- to 13-year-olds who differed in their access to sound. Hearing children, deaf children with cochlear implants, and deaf children without implants participated in a task in which they were to respond to some visual signals and not others. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that the timing of developmental changes in visual selective attention was similar for all 3 groups, occurring around 8 years. The magnitude of age-related change differed among groups; hearing children and older deaf children using a cochlear implant reached higher levels of performance with age than did deaf children without enhanced access to sound. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that the developmental differences between deaf children with and without cochlear implants begin prior to 8 years and may be related to their use of environmental sounds to organize visual attention.

Zahn-Waxler, Carolyn

doi: 10.1037/h0090327pmid: N/A

Salthouse, Timothy A.

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.851pmid: N/A

Age-related increases in childhood and age-related decreases in adulthood have been reported for a wide variety of cognitive variables, but relatively little research has addressed the question of the independence of these influences. In this project, cross-sectional life span data (age 5 to 94 years) from the nationally representative sample used to establish the norms for the Woodcock–Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery (R. W. Woodcock & M. B. Johnson, 1989, 1990) were subjected to several types of analyses. The results indicated that the majority of age-related differences appear to be shared across different cognitive variables and are well predicted by individual differences in higher order factors. These findings suggest that the role of task-specific interpretations of developmental differences in cognition needs to be reevaluated to take into consideration the lack of independence of age-related influences on a variety of cognitive variables.

Klaczynski, Paul A.; Narasimham, Gayathri

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.865pmid: N/A

In Experiment 1, preadolescents, middle adolescents, and late adolescents were presented 3 deductive reasoning tasks. With some important exceptions, conditional reasoning improved with age on problems containing permission conditional relations, and reasoning fallacies increased with age on problems containing causal conditional relations. The results of Experiments 2a and 2b indicated that problem type (i.e., permission or causal) does not mediate the activation of conditional reasoning skills. Rather, valid conditional inferences are more common on problems for which plausible alternative antecedents can be generated than on problems for which alternative antecedent generation is difficult. Conditional rules for which alternative antecedent generation is difficult may be misrepresented as biconditionals, resulting in biconditional rather than conditional reasoning.

Canobi, Katherine H.; Reeve, Robert A.; Pattison, Philippa E.

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.882pmid: N/A

The study examined the relationship between children's conceptual understanding and addition problem-solving procedures. Forty-eight 6- to 8-year-olds solved addition problems and, in a 2nd task, were prompted to judge whether a puppet could use the arithmetic properties of one problem to solve the next problem. Relational properties between consecutive problems were manipulated to reflect aspects of additive composition, commutativity, and associativity principles. Conceptual understanding was assessed by the ability to spontaneously use such relational properties in problem solving (Task 1) and to recognize and explain them when prompted (Task 2). Results revealed that conceptual understanding was related to using order-indifferent, decomposition, and retrieval strategies and speed and accuracy in solving unrelated problems. The importance of conceptual understanding for addition development is discussed.

Zahn-Waxler, Carolyn

doi: 10.1037/h0090328pmid: N/A

Harter, Susan; Waters, Patricia L.; Whitesell, Nancy R.; Kastelic, Diana

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.892pmid: N/A

Adolescence brings with it displays of false self-behavior, including the suppression of opinions. C. Gilligan (1993) argued that lack of “voice” is problematic for girls when they enter adolescence. In the present study, the authors examined level of self-reported voice with parents, teachers, male classmates, female classmates, and close friends among both female and male high school students. Findings revealed no gender differences nor evidence that voice declines in female adolescents. For both genders, perceived support for voice was predictive of level of voice. Moreover, feminine girls reported lower levels of voice than did androgynous girls in public (but not private) relational contexts. Lower levels of voice were associated with more negative evaluations of self-worth. Discussion focused on the need to understand the causes of individual differences in voice within each gender, cautioning against generalizations about either gender as a group.

Bennett, Mark; Lyons, Evanthia; Sani, Fabio; Barrett, Martyn

doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.34.5.902pmid: N/A

Recent developments in social psychology have explained children's preference for members of the in-group in terms of processes of self-categorization and identification with the in-group. In contrast, this study, addressing nationality self-conceptions, examines the possibility that even before subjective identification with the group has occurred, as de facto group members, children will have been exposed to a great deal of positive information about their own national group, which is likely to encourage group-serving judgments. Children who had failed to identify themselves as members of their national group were required in this study to make evaluative judgments about 5 national groups, including their own. Significant preference for the in-group emerged on 2 of 3 measures. It is concluded that subjective identification with the in-group is not a necessary precondition for in-group favoritism.