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Parents’ distancing language—language that requires cognitive abstraction and moves beyond the “here and now”—relates to children’s literacy skills, but its association with mathematics remains unexamined. Participants were 242 mother–child dyads from African American, Chinese American, Dominican American, and Mexican American backgrounds. Mothers’ distancing language was examined while mothers shared a wordless book with their 5-year-olds; children’s math and literacy skills were assessed when children were 5.0 and 6.5 years of age. Mothers’ distancing language, but not amount of language (word tokens), related to children’s concurrent math and literacy skills. Mothers’ distancing language predicted growth in children’s literacy skills over time and related to later math indirectly through associations with early math. The importance of distancing language for cognitive growth may have implications for parenting and classroom practice.

The contribution of intentionality understanding to symbolic development was examined. Actors added colored dots to a map, displaying either symbolic or aesthetic intentions. In Study 1, most children (5-6 years) understood actors' intentions, but when asked which graphic would help find hidden objects, most selected the incorrect (aesthetic) one whose dot color matched referent color. On a similar task in Study 2, 5- and 6-year-olds systematically picked incorrectly, 9- and 10-year-olds picked correctly, and 7- and 8-year-olds showed mixed performance. When referent color matched neither symbolic nor aesthetic dot colors, children performed better overall, but only the oldest children universally selected the correct graphic and justified choices with intentionality. Results bear on theory of mind, symbolic understanding, and map understanding.

To investigate children's ability to translate between the environment and an abstract representation, fourth graders were asked to indicate the location of colored flags by placing similarly colored stickers on a map. In the explaining condition, students wrote down what clues they had used; in the baseline condition, they placed stickers without explanation. The explaining students significantly outperformed the baseline students, especially with respect to egregious errors indicative of failure to understand basic representational correspondence. The hypothesized interpretation is that children who generated explanations were more likely to notice and then correct discrepancies between their answers in progress and the referent space and that they did so by activating existing spatial and symbolic competencies.

This chapter begins by describing a fundamental way in which the study of cognitive development has changed between the publication of the first edition of the Handbook of Child Psychology in 1946 and of the volume on cognitive processes contained in this edition of the Handbook. Early scholars often tried to catalogue which specific, isolated cognitive process accounted for which particular cognitive outcome, whereas contributors to the latest volume reflect a relational-systems framework that approaches cognitive processes within broader biological and sociocultural contexts. Several themes run through the volume chapters including the importance of symbols; the power and pervasiveness of inferential or logical processes; connections between cognition and emotion; and the importance of diversity with respect to both individuals' own characteristics and surrounding culture. The chapter closes with a precis of each of the individual chapters contained in the volume. Keywords: cognitive development; diversity; relational systems; sociocultural context; symbolic development

A large literature has shown that children's beliefs and aspirations about occupations reflect cultural gender stereotypes. One channel that may create or sustain occupational stereotypes is language. Two studies were designed to examine whether children interpret occupational titles as gender specific or gender neutral. In Study 1, children (6- to 11-year-olds, N = 64) were asked directly if various job titles could be used for both men and women doing the job. In Study 2, children (6- to 10-year-olds, N = 51) were shown pictures of men and women engaged in job activities and asked which one(s) showed someone who could be called a(n)__. Titles were linguistically unmarked for gender (e.g., doctor), strongly marked (e.g., policeman), or weakly marked (e.g., postmaster). Marked titles were given in masculine and feminine forms. Findings reinforced past work showing that marked titles are exclusionary, revealed that some children harbor confusions about even unmarked titles, and demonstrated the mediating role of individual differences in attitudes. Implications for the changing lexicon and for educational programs are discussed.

Gender schema theories predict that memories will be biased toward information associated with one's own sex. Meta-analyses were performed on the association between a child's sex and memories for (1) items depicting stereotypically masculine and feminine actions, characteristics, or objects, and (2) male and female characters. Same-sex biases were evident in memories for masculine and feminine items, especially after a delay and when the memory task was recall, and in memories for male and female characters. The same-sex bias in memory for male characters was larger when the characters were not engaged in gender-stereotyped activities. The implications of these results for gender schema theories and for the preparation of educational materials are discussed.

Contents: Preface: Reflections on a Scholar. Part I: Art and Aesthetics. H.E. Gruber, Aspects of Scientific Discovery: Aesthetics and Cognition. H. Gardner, E. Winner, The Course of Creative Growth: A Tribute to Joachim Wohlwill. H. Beilin, Developmental Aesthetics and the Psychology of Photography. Part II: Human-Environment Interaction. E.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach: A Foundation for Environmental Psychology. I. Altman, A Personal Perspective on the Environment and Behavior Field. L.S. Liben, R.M. Downs, The Role of Graphic Representations in Understanding the World. S. Wapner, J. Demick, Some Relations Between Developmental and Environmental Psychology: An Organismic-Developmental Systems Perspective. Part III: Concepts of Development. J.R. Nesselroade, The Warp and the Woof of the Developmental Fabric. M.W. Sullivan, M. Lewis, S.M. Alessandri, The Interface Between Emotion and Cognition. W.F. Overton, Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Developmental Theory and Research Strategies.

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The study was designed to test the hypothesis derived from cognitive-developmental theory that multiple classification skill plays an important role in children's gender stereotyping and in their processing of counterstereotypic gender information. Children (N= 75; 5-10 years) were matched on pretest measures of gender stereotyping and multiple classification skill and then assigned to: (1) multiple classification training using nonsocial stimuli, (2) multiple classification training using social stimuli, (3) a rule training intervention, or (4) a control intervention. Children who had acquired multiple classification skill via training with social stimuli and those children trained on rules for occupational sorting showed significantly more egalitarian responding on a subsequent measure of gender stereotyping and superior memory for counterstereotypic information embedded in stories. Additionally, children who had acquired multiple classification skill via training with nonsocial stimuli showed superior memory for counterstereotypic information, despite demonstrating no greater flexibility on the gender stereotyping measure. Both theoretical and educational implications of results are discussed.

It is generally recognized that geographic education and cognitive development are intertwined at the precollege level. Here we argue that college-level instruction likewise depends upon appreciating the cognitive-developmental level of students as well as their level of geographic expertise. In particular, we set geographic instruction within a Piagetian approach to cognitive development and illustrate this approach by reference to two fundamental topics covered in cartographic instruction: map projections and coordinate systems. We present data demonstrating that not all college students readily have available the cognitive and spatial skills needed to understand fundamentals of map projections and coordinate systems. Instruction on map projections typically relies on reference to shadow projections, and yet significant numbers of college students fail to understand even the simplest cases of shadow projections. Instruction on coordinate systems assumes a Euclidean understanding of spatial rela...

Many adults fail the Piagetian water-level task designed to assess children's abilities to use coordinate axes for representing physical phenomena. Although McGillicuddy-De Lisi, De Lisi, and Youniss (1978) reported that adults' difficulties virtually disappear with a crossbar horizontality task, this advantage might reflect the absence of an embedding nonoblique context. Consistent with this hypothesis, college students in Study 1 performed no better on an embedded crossbar task than on the water-level task. Performance was significantly better on a disembedded crossbar task. The predicted superiority of field independence was not found. In Study 2, college students' performance on the embedded crossbar and water-level tasks again did not differ significantly. Performance on disembedded crossbar tasks was better than on the water-level task, regardless of whether or not the symmetrical, pivoted nature of the crossbar was emphasized

This article introduces a collection of essays on continuity and discontinuity in cognitive development. In his lead essay, J. Kagan (2008) argues that limitations in past research (e.g., on number concepts, physical solidarity, and object permanence) render conclusions about continuity premature. Commentaries respectively (1) argue that longitudinal contexts are essential for interpreting developmental data, (2) illustrate the value of converging measures, (3) identify qualitative change via dynamical systems theory, (4) redirect the focus from states to process, and (5) review epistemological premises of alternative research traditions. Following an overview of the essays, this introductory article discusses how the search for developmental structures, continuity, and process differs between mechanistic-contextualist and organismic-contextualist metatheoretical frameworks, and closes by highlighting continuities in Kagan’s scholarship over the past half century.

Epistemic actions are actions in the physical environment taken with the intent of gathering information or facilitating cognition. As students and geologists explain how they integrated observations from artificial rock outcrops to select the best model of a three-dimensional geological structure, they occasionally take the following actions, which we interpret as epistemic: remove rejected models from the field of view, juxtapose two candidate models, juxtapose and align a candidate model with their sketch map, rotate a candidate model into alignment with the full scale geological structure, and reorder their field notes from a sentential order into a spatial configuration. Our study differs from prior work on epistemic actions in that our participants manipulate spatial representations (models, sketches, maps), rather than non-representational objects. When epistemic actions are applied to representations, the actions can exploit the dual nature of representations by manipulating the physical aspect to enhance the representational aspect.

Research on gender-schematic processing has shown that children often forget and/or distort counterstereotypic information. This process may in part explain the limited impact of past intervention efforts in which children were simply exposed to counterstereotypic information. Here we attempt to reduce schematic-processing distortions by first teaching children decision rules about occupational sorting based not on gender but rather on interests and skills. It was hypothesized that this intervention would lead to greater flexibility in children's beliefs about what men and women can do. Assuming this effect was found, the study was designed to provide an experimental test of the hypothesized relation between attitudes and memory that had been demonstrated only correlationally in previous research. As predicted, the experimental intervention with elementary school children led to a reduction of occupational stereotyping. Children's own occupational aspirations were not, however, significantly affected. Consistent with the hypothesized effect of attitudes on memory, children in the experimental intervention showed superior recall of counterstereotypic information in a later memory test. Results are discussed with respect to the utility of cognitive-developmental theory for planning and evaluating future interventions.

Spatial thinking is a powerful form of human cognition. It is used in a plethora of occupational activities (e.g., reading architectural blueprints), educational curriculum (e.g., using graphs and molecular models in science class), and everyday tasks (e.g., packing suitcases into a car trunk). Developmental psychologists, differential psychologists, and educational psychologists have studied the emergence of spatial thinking over the life course, identified meaningful differences among individuals and groups, and demonstrated that spatial thinking can be improved through interventions. The finding that many individuals do not achieve high spatial skills on their own implies the need for explicit spatial education. Recognizing that adding a standalone spatial education curriculum is unrealistic, it is argued that spatial education should be infused within existing courses. One particularly good vehicle for enhancing spatial instruction is geography, a discipline that places spatial thinking at its core. Furthermore, a key tool of geography (as well as of many other disciplines) – the map – is a flexible and powerful spatial representation. Thus, map education is singled out for particular focus. The chapter provides reviews of major qualities and functions of maps and of developmental changes in map mastery, and offers illustrations of both traditional and developmentally motivated map education curriculum. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some practical challenges in map education, and urges continued efforts in devising, implementing, and evaluating programs designed to educate spatial thinkers. Keywords: children; cognitive development; developmental psychology; education; geography; geography education; map education; maps; sex differences; spatial cognition; spatial education; spatial skills; spatial thinking

This research was designed to examine the quality of children's aesthetic understanding of photographs, observe social interactions between parents and children in this aesthetic domain, and study whether qualitatively different dyadic interactions were associated with children's own aesthetic understanding. Parents and children (7–13 years; 40 dyads) individually completed measures of aesthetic understanding and jointly selected photographs for a souvenir scrapbook. Parents' artistic experience varied widely and was associated with their own performance on aesthetic understanding measures. Children's performance on the individual aesthetic tasks was related to age, but not to parents' art experience nor to the qualities of parent–child discussions of aesthetic concepts. Among both parents and children, artistic experience was associated with aesthetic preferences for photographs.

This research was designed to observe whether parents guide their children's understanding of spatial-graphic representations and, if so, to describe the quality of the strategies they use. Parents read a picture book to their preschoolers (3 or 5 years, N=31) and children completed spatial-graphic comprehension tasks. Observational data revealed a range of creative behaviors used to address the book's spatial-graphic challenges. The incidence and quality of parental spatial-graphic behaviors were significantly related to 5-year-old children's performance on spatial-graphic measures. These findings, as well as the paucity of parent attention to aesthetics or graphic production techniques, are discussed in relation to representational development and educational practice.

Males typically surpass females in spatial performance, an outcome that may be linked to testosterone and estrogen. The authors (a) review physiological mechanisms, developmental periods, and past empirical work relevant to sex steroids' effects on human spatial performance and (b) report an experimental study of the role of actively circulating sex steroids in adolescents being treated for delayed puberty (N = 55; mean age = 13.70 years). Sex steroids (simulating early, middle, and late puberty) and placebos were given alternately over 21 months and spatial tests were given every 3 months. Spatial performance showed traditional sex differences but did not vary with levels of actively circulating sex steroids.

Free recall tasks with semantically categorizable stimuli were given to 60 deaf and 60 hearing children, divided equally among Grades 3, 5, and 7 (ages 9, 11, and 13 years, respectively). Half the children were trained to use semantic categorization as a memory aid after the first study-test trial. All subjects were told category labels and sizes on the third recall trial. As hypothesized, older children showed more spontaneous semantic clustering and higher recall scores than younger children. Training increased clustering in all groups, while the provision of category information at retrieval increased clustering regardless of training condition. Contrary to expectations, deaf children used semantic clustering as much as hearing children. Deaf children's recall scores, however, were significantly lower than hearing children's. The specific contrasts observed between deaf and hearing children's performance suggest that deaf children's recall deficiencies probably reflect either inadequate knowledge of category membership or inflexibility in reclassifying individual items, rather than a general inability to recognize and use the categorical nature of a list as a mnemonic aid.

A cursory reading of the chapters in these volumes on Cognitive Processes and Spatial Orientation in Animal and Man might leave the impression that maps play a central role in the study of both process and behavior. Maps and the associated mapping process appear in a variety of guises. As cognitive maps, for example, they provide the central organizing concept for describing the functions and properties of internal spatial representations (see Downs, 1981a, b). When paired with the idea of a compass, maps provide the basis for understanding navigational behavior in a wide range of species. As data generating and data representing techniques, maps play a central role in research methodology (Downs, 1985).

We expect that many readers encountered this article with the beliefs that maps are highly specialized devices primarily used for wayfinding; that they represent the spatial world in a single, correct form; that they are readily transparent; and that their sole contribution to psychology is their role in externalizing environmental cognition. By discussing the myriad functions and forms of maps, by highlighting their symbolic nature, and by considering some of the misconceptions about maps, we have attempted to demonstrate the value of maps for addressing a wide range of developmental questions. Our review of past research literature suggests that research conducted within individual disciplines has both strengths and limitations. Work in the psychological tradition is characterized by attention to important subject characteristics and to carefully described and implemented research designs, procedures, coding, and analyses. At the same time, this work reveals, at best, highly restricted views about maps, and at worst, fundamental misconceptions about maps. Work in the geographic and environmental traditions, in contrast, samples a broader range of map forms and functions, but it suffers from inattention to procedural details that makes the conclusions less compelling than they might otherwise be. A conventional wisdom is emerging from the work in both traditions: That children's map understanding occurs extremely early and extremely easily. The limitations of both research traditions, however, suggest the need for caution in accepting this view. Developmental and cartographic theories provide a compelling reason to reexamine the early and easy view and suggest the need for alternative conceptual and empirical approaches. We have argued that future work should integrate the traditions of psychology and geography. Illustrative data from an interdisciplinary program of research were presented. We described work demonstrating the gradual and difficult process of mastering the representational and geometric correspondences that link the map to its referent in the world. Our data suggest that there are significant achievements in map conceptualization (the understanding of the concept of a map), map identification (understanding the formal components of a map), and map utilization (the ability to use maps). Our data support the view that maps are not transparent and that children's abilities to understand, use, and create maps are linked to their developing representational and spatial skills. In concluding, we should acknowledge that we have deliberately pushed interpretations about understanding maps as symbolic representations to the extreme. The reason for this strategy is simple: We believe that work on maps--both in the public schools and in academia--is assumed to be an expendable and irrelevant luxury.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Jean Piaget’s early work was largely concerned with the identification and explanation of qualitative changes in the developing child’s intellectual structure. Subsequent Genevan work has been concerned with clarifying the ways in which this general intellectual structure interacts with other cognitive processes such as perception (Piaget, 1969) and imagery (Piaget and Inhelder, 1971). More recently, Piaget and Inhelder (1973) have examined the relation between intelligence and memory, and it is this work that is reviewed in the present chapter.

To study spatial representation, Kosslyn, Pick, and Fariello (Child Development, 1974, 45, 707–716) asked preschoolers and adults to learn toy locations in a room divided into quadrants. When asked to rank order the closeness of toys, preschoolers exaggerated distances between objects separated by opaque or transparent barriers; adults distorted across opaque barriers only. The findings were interpreted as showing that children's spatial representations may rely more than adults' on functional distance and/or that children may have more difficulty than adults keeping many objects in mind simultaneously (integrative processing capacity). The Kosslyn et al. procedure was repeated here with first graders and adults, using either rank ordering techniques or direct distance estimations. Interactions of age and barrier appeared for the rank ordering measure only. Children showed a greater tendency than adults to group their rankings by quadrant. With the distance estimation measure, adults were quantitatively more accurate than children, at least among males; barrier effects interacted with sex and distance, but not age. These findings suggest the importance of integrative processing capacity, and that different dependent measures may tap different processes.

Experiment 1 examined short-term memory with a serial probe task in 20 younger (mean age: 6 years, 3 months) and 20 older (mean age: 8 years, 8 months) deaf children. Four sets of stimuli were used: familiar animals, unfamiliar nonsense forms, fingerspelled letters, and lower-case print. In contrast to earlier research with hearing children, strong primacy effects were found with all stimuli at both ages, with frequent gestural and/or oral labeling but little cumulative rehearsal evident. To determine whether results were uniquely tied to deafness, identical procedures were used in Experiment 2 with 20 younger (4 years, 9 months) and 20 older (5 years, 10 months) hearing children. Again, overt activity was common, with strong primacy effects on animals and nonsense forms in the older group and on animals in the younger group. Contrasts between present and earlier findings suggest the need to consider the degree to which stimulus labels are overlearned, the role of nonverbal mediators in rehearsal, and the effects of changing educational experiences.