PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

C Sophian

Publications and source records attributed to C Sophian.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Representation and reasoning in early numerical development: counting, conservation, and comparisons between sets.

The first experiment examined the developmental relation between counting and number conservation in the 3-6-year-old age range. Results indicated extended developments in both children's counting and their conservation reasoning, and a close relation between the 2. Only the oldest children gave evidence of conserving, and they also differentiated appropriately between conservation and control problems in their use of counting. The second and third experiments extended the finding that children below 6 years of age do not conserve to conditions in which counting was precluded. These results provide evidence of protracted developments in young children's understanding of relational aspects of number.

Child↗
PubMed1987

Young children's sensitivity to logical necessity in their inferential search behavior.

Young children's ability to evaluate the logical necessity of 2 types of inferences was studied in 2 experiments involving 68 3-7-year-olds. Children searched the doors of model houses in order to determine whether a house matched a description specifying certain numbers and types of occupants. A search task used in Experiments 1 and 2 allowed children to search for additional information if initial information was insufficient to support a logically necessary inference about whether the house was correct or incorrect. A judgment condition used in Experiment 2 required a "can't tell" response to insufficient information. Even 3-year-olds showed some ability to evaluate the logical necessity of an inference that confirmed a house was correct. Developmental changes involved increased reliability of individuals' performance and increased range of application of children's inference evaluation procedures to include more difficult, disconfirmatory inferences and cases where greater certainty in reasoning seemed to be required. Results are discussed in terms of an account of the gradual development and consolidation of an ability to evaluate the necessity of inferences, perhaps first apparent in preschoolers' sensitivity to conditions of sufficient and insufficient information in information-acquisition problems.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1985

Infants' search for visible objects: implications for the interpretation of early search errors.

This study examined the error patterns of 9-month-old infants searching for hidden objects and objects that were visible within a container. Although errors occurred in both conditions, there were important differences between them. When the object was hidden, infants showed significant perseveration in that they searched more often at the object's previous hiding place than at a control location. When the object was visible, however, they made fewer errors and the errors they did make were as likely to be to the control location as to the previous hiding place. These results suggest that infants' errors in searching for a visible object reflect lapses of attention rather than systematic misunderstandings of objects or space and so are not incompatible with an information-processing account of early search.

Attention↗
PubMed1983

Selective information use and perseveration in the search behavior of infants and young children.

Two experiments examined the early development of selective information use in search. The first experiment tested 9- and 16-month-olds on a modification of Piaget's Stage IV object permanence task. It examined infants' use of information from previous experiences with an object (prior information) and from the most recent hiding (current information) to locate a hidden object. In the second experiment, 2-, 2 1/2-, and 4-year-old children received these same sources of information along with new forms of prior and current information: information about the typical locations of objects (location specificity) and verbal information. No systematic perseveration was observed at 9 months, although previous findings related to perseveration were replicated. Perseveration was found at 16 months, but there was also evidence of selectivity at that age. When errors occurred, they tended to be to the prior location, but they were infrequent in comparison to correct searches at the current location. The preschoolers, while continuing to show perseveration, were more consistently selective than the infants. They also showed considerable generality in extending their selectivity to new sources of information.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1983

Developments in infants' search for displaced objects.

In an exploratory study of infants' search for displaced objects, 13-month-olds and 21-month-olds were tested on three kinds of displacement problems--visible displacements, invisible displacements, and transpositions--as well as single-hiding problems. Two aspects of performance on the displacement problems were distinguished: (1) searching within the locations involved in the displacement rather than at a control location, and (2) selecting between the displacement locations. Both the younger and the older infants were able to select the correct location on visible displacement problems and to search within the displacement locations on invisible problems. Neither age group was able to solve the transposition problems, but the older infants did at least search within the relevant locations on those problems. Age differences appeared to be due primarily to improved skill at identifying relevant locations rather than to improvements in selecting among those locations. Other factors contributing to the age differences in performance were a decrease in response biases and an increase in skills for coping with multiple possibilities.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1981

Semantic and contextual cuing of preschool children's recall.

3 experiments were carried out to investigate cuing of young children's recall. In each experiment younger (3 years) and older (4 1/2 years) preschool children were tested on free and cued recall tasks in which the presence of semantic and contextual cues was manipulated. In the first 2 experiments there was little evidence that the children's recall was facilitated by presence of contextual cues, independent of the facilitation produced by semantic information. In the third experiment, context and target items were integrated experimentally at presentation. In this case, unrelated context cues improved recall. This finding suggests that limitations in the facilitatory effects of context cues for preschool children are related to the ways these young children initially encode target and context items. In all 3 experiments semantic cues aided both younger and older children's recall. Moreover, there was evidence of a developmental increase in the effectiveness of semantic, but not contextual, cues. This finding highlights the importance of growth of the semantic knowledge base for early memory development.

Child Development↗