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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of stimulus dimension and mode of exploration on preschool children's responses to two original thinking tasks. Eighty children from four child care centers ranging in age from 46-65 months comprised the five condition groups: 2-D stimuli for visual exploration only, 2-D stimuli for visual plus haptic exploration, 3-D stimuli for visual exploration only, 3-D stimuli for visual plus haptic exploration. The groups were match on intelligence, sex, and center attended. IQ scores were extrapolated from the Information and Picture Completion subtests of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence. During the test session the children were shown the stimulus materials in the appropriate dimension and mode of exploration for their condition. The unusual uses task and the pattern meanings task were used to assess original thinking. The children's responses were scored for total fluency and unique responses. Several factors relating to the selection of the optimal method of stimulus presentation were considered in relation to the development of an assessment tool for creativity in young children. Significant relationships were found between the pattern meanings task and unusual uses task when the 3-D stimuli were used and haptic exploration was allowed. This relationship was much higher for this condition than the correlation of either task to IQ. Three dimensional stimuli and visual plus haptic exploration also had the highest mean fluency of responses although one way analysis of covariance failed to show significant effects of group and total fluency or unique responses. From these findings the best form of stimulus presentation to assess original thinking in preschool children appears to be three-dimensions with visual plus haptic exploration. Additional investigation is warranted into the effects of dimension and exploration and their interaction on the generation of responses to original thinking tasks in young children. / Master of Science

Past research has shown that there are differences between children's ability to express verbally moral judgment or social cognitive principles (cognitive-expression) and their ability to understand and utilize these principles when making evaluations about others (cognitive-reception). This study investigated these differences.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1978 D45 / Master of Science

This research focuses on answering the question of whether a child with a learning problem, or more specifically, a learning disability, functions at a lower cognitive level than the non-learning disabled child. Performance on certain memory tasks and tasks that require the withholding of attention from distractors is measured and compared. In the literature study, an overview of the neurological, the cognitive and the ecological approaches to remediation is given. The concepts of attention deficits and memory problems are investigated, as well as the theories of cognitive development as propounded by Piaget and Santostefano. No significant difference in the cognitive functioning, as measured by the test used in this research, was found between these two groups of children. The implication of this is that where children experience learning problems, the explanation for this difficulty is possibly at an ecological level. More specifically, it may relate to a lack of stimulation during the pre-school years. / Psychology of Education / M. Ed. (Guidance and Counselling)

The search for evidence of cognitive abilities in young children that have been previously detected only in the performance of older children and adults has been a target of study by many cognitive developmental psychologists. Early competency views suggest that aspects of cognitive fundamentals are present very early in life and are in some aspects developmentally invariant. Often, the focus of research is on the delineation of the constraints which direct and restrict deployment of early intellectual abilities to illuminate the regularities and patterns in observed developmental change. The purpose of this research was to examine children's proficiency with mental rotation tasks that involved the reorientation of complex multi-component stimuli. Specifically, the existence of stimulus effect and determination of which stimulus components prove problematic under taxing performance conditions was investigated. Sixteen students, eight first graders and eight third graders, participated in a two-choice discrimination task. Each student was assessed individually on 360 test trials in eight 20-minute sessions. Three test conditions included (1) perception, (2) memory, and (3) rotation. Two multi-component stimuli were used in which the experimenter-defined components included (A) an external protrusion on the edge of a circle, and (B) an internal axis system within the interior of the circle. The two stimuli varied in the placement of the internal axes which was either orthogonally or obliquely orientated. Test items in the memory and the rotation conditions included stimuli orthogonally oriented (90°, 180°, 270°) obliquely oriented (45°, 135°, 225°, 315°). Error scores were analyzed in a four-way analysis of variance. A main effect for foil type was found significant with axis foils being more difficult than protrusion foils. Furthermore, a significant four-way interaction effect was detected indicating that as stimulus characteristics and task demands increased in difficulty, performance declined particularly for the younger age group.

The present study was a systematic investigation of developmental skill sequences in the early science domain. Three developmental sequences in the area of astronomy were investigated; knowledge about earth, light and motion. Test items were developed reflecting developmental sequences based on the cognitive processes that are necessary for understanding each task. Data were collected from 1595 kindergarten children from six geographically diverse areas. Latent trait models were constructed to reflect the hypothesized developmental sequences by allowing discrimination and difficulty parameters to vary or by constraining them to equal. Preferred models were obtained by statistical comparison with other models. The knowledge about light and motion were in the hypothesized developmental sequence. Astronomical events that contradicted personal experience, required causal explanations and consisted of extended causal chains were the most difficult for kindergarten children to understand. Investigations concerning the mechanism for conceptual change are necessary.

Tweens are a new cohort of children who are not considered children, but have not developed into fully autonomous teenagers (Hulan, 2007: 31). Tweens are regarded as the “richest generation of children” (Lindstrom, 2004: 175). Their high disposable income and ability to influence consumption through endorsement makes tweens a potentially profitable niche market. In order to formulate an effective marketing campaign, marketing managers need to be aware of children’s advertising literacy, as well as the effect which peer endorsement has on consumption. Consequently, to determine the impact of these variables, a questionnaire was administered to 574 respondents and an empirical correlation experiment was conducted involving 202 participants. The primary research objective was to determine tweens advertising literacy at different ages and the concurrent affect which it had on their propensity to consume; advertising literacy is described by Priya, Baisya and Sharma (2010: 154) as the extent to which children are aware that advertisements have a selling intent, are persuasive, and are intrinsically biased. The effect which endorsement had on consumption was also assessed. Data was analysed utilising SPSS (Statistics Package for Social Sciences). Key findings were graphically represented, and compared to literature with a focus on Piaget’s Hierarchy of Cognitive development and Roedder’s information processing model (Roedder, 1981: 145; Piaget, 1960: 135). The research established that there was a strong positive correlation between advertising literacy and age. The research showed that this cognizance had a concurrent negative effect on tweens propensity to consume and consequently advertising literacy had a negative correlation with propensity to consume. The research also determined the extent which endorsement influenced consumption. In accordance with Childers and Rao (1993: 464) the degree of conspicuousness during consumption was assessed. The research established that respondents were more inclined to consume an endorsed product which had higher conspicuousness during consumption (i.e. a public good) than a good with lower consumption conspicuousness (i.e. a private good). Similarly, endorsed luxury goods exhibited a higher consumption propensity than necessity goods. The research also determined that the reference group construct affected the extent to which endorsement influenced consumption; familial endorsement had a stronger effect on consumption than peer endorsement. From these key findings, recommendations for South African managers were provided. The report culminated with recommendations for future research. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2013.

Empirical work investigating children's temporal representations has included investigations of children's awareness of the past, present and future; their understanding of temporal order and their representation of duration. Previous work on children's temporal awareness leads to the question of whether children can access cognitive representations of durations in situations where the temporal aspects of the task are not made directly apparent either in the information given prior to stimulus presentation or in the subsequent question. There is very little evidence to indicate whether these representations might be accessed in the absence of any specific reference to the temporal aspects of the procedure. The empirical work in this thesis focuses on children's developing representation of duration in a procedure that avoids making specific reference to the temporal aspects of the task, in a context more closely analogous to their real world experiences where durations occur in the absence of salient prompts and cues. Results Data from over three hundred children who participated in the seven experiments in this series are encouraging and suggest that by the age of six years children do become able to differentially represent durations of 10 and 25 seconds in a procedure where no explicit reference was made to the temporal aspects of the experience, and the ability to differentially represent durations of 25 and 40 seconds, in this context, emerges later in development, at around eight years of age. 2 Conclusions This series 0 xperiments indicates that by six years of age children are able to represent durations in the absence of explicit reference to the temporal aspect of the task, and they are able to differentially represent durations of 10 and 25 seconds. Around eight years of age they are able to differentially represent durations of 25 and 40 seconds However whilst these findings indicate that children of six years and above may be able to differentially represent durations in this range.the inconsistencies in performance in the series of experiments suggest that the ability may be fragile. Whilst children in this age range are able to demonstrate the ability to code durations the limiting factors on their ability to do so in real world contexts remain unclear. Short abstract. Word count: 363.