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D J Dickerson

Publications and source records attributed to D J Dickerson.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1995

Children's inferences of causal events during story understanding.

Second-grade children's inference of causal events was studied. Each of the 24 children heard 2 stories containing 6 event episodes. Each story was followed by either a sentence recognition or a cued-recall test. Event episodes explicitly stated an event followed by its outcome. Enablement episodes explicitly stated an action that was causally antecedent to the event, followed by the outcome of the event. Filler (control) episodes explicitly stated an action causally unrelated to the event, followed by the outcome of the event. The results indicate that the children more frequently inferred events from enablements than they inferred enablements from events, and that the children did not make the inferences at the time of reading, but instead made them when queried at the time of the test. This conclusion is suggested because there was false recognition of events but no false recall.

Attention↗
PubMed1992

Development of inquiry behavior in concept identification.

We studied inquiry behavior in concept identification in first-, fifth-, eighth-grade, and college students with problems involving eight four-letter strings. The task was to identify the correct string by asking questions related to either one letter or four letters that were answered by yes or no. Processing demands were manipulated by comparing (a) a condition in which letter strings were removed from view as feedback eliminated them as possible solutions with a condition in which strings remained in view and (b) problems that were structured so that relevant letter categories were easy to identify with problems that were not. Problem solving generally improved with age. First graders tended to ask questions that eliminated solutions one by one, whereas the older groups asked more informative questions. At the three upper grade levels, strategies for selecting queries were adapted to situations, with less demanding strategies being used when processing demands were higher.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1981

Development of logical search and visual scanning in children.

Children at 5, 6, 7, and 8 years of age were told a story in which a doll traveled through a physical model of a house. The doll had a toy in one room and, then, three rooms after, discovered it to be missing. Tests were made of logical search (i.e., the tendency, when asked to find the toy, to restrict search to the critical area between the rooms). The presence of visual cues that marked the critical area was manipulated, and the visual scanning of these cues was monitored. Children in the two younger groups exhibited virtually no logical search either when cues were absent or present, 7-year-old children showed logical search only when cues were present, and 8-year-old children showed logical search both when cues were absent and present. In the cues-present conditions logical search was related to visual scanning of the cues.

Child↗