Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-121). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.Psych.Clin.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (B.A. (Hons.)) - University of Queensland, 2005. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Margaret Semrud-Clikeman. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This study examines the nature of parental involvement in the infants' play with objects (toys) and the effectiveness of the various forms of the parent's (mother's) intervention on the infant's cognitive growth. Assessment of the levels of the infants' cognitive competence were obtained through the administration of the Uzgiria and Hunt's "Infants Psychological Development Scales" which provided a formal measure of performance in various tasks that are related to specific areas of sensorimotor intelligence. Videotapes of 15-minute mother-infant play sessions in their homes, involving 6-, 9-, 12- and 15-month-old infants were quantified in terms of maternal and infant categories of behaviour that described variations in the involvement and complexity of the mothers' participation and the cognitive and social components of the infants' orientation to toys in an interpersonal context. Besides this cross-sectional method of data- collection, for each group, a quasi-longitudinal approach was adopted to trace the developmental changes of interpersonal play with objects across a period of three months. Analyses of maternal categories revealed quantitative and qualitative changes in maternal style of interaction as a function of the infant's age, as well as his level of cognitive abilities -relative to age peers. Mothers of 6-manth-olds were different from the mothers in the other groups in that they directed their infants' play into specific channels to an equal extent as their passive participation in the infants' spontaneous manipulative acts. All the other mothers adopted this latter 'enhancing' role to a greater extent than the former 'modifying' one. All mothers engaged in very little structured 'teaching' and very little 'assistance' of their infants. Analysis of the infants' data showed definite developmental changes in all forms of infants' orientation to objects in an interpersonal context. Cooperative play became noticeably more frequent and was more often infant-initiated after age 15 months. Rejection of play with the mother and lack of concentration on the play-task was characteristic of the 9-12 month-old infants. From the data, three conclusions were derived with respect to parental support and its effectiveness. Firstly, parents encourage autonomy and spontaneity in the infant since they 'enhance interaction' with the toys more than they 'modify' it. 'Modifying' is situation-specific in the sense that it increased when the infants' spontaneous manipulations were relatively infrequent, or when they were characterised by a low-level of cognitive complexity, or when the infant was less advanced than his peers on the sensorimotor intelligence scales. However, with age increases the mothers increased their demands from the infants by initiating more tasks for them to reciprocate. The second conclusion is that when the mothers 'modify' interaction they time their activities in accordance with the infants' ongoing behaviour thereby encouraging the infants' attention to the mother and increasing the likelihood of achieving the goal set by her. The third conclusion relates to the effectiveness of parental intervention. Infants whose age was above 9 months seemed to be more dependent on, and more affected by, their mothers' directive intervention. These findings are discussed in terms of the implication for child- rearing practices and pre-school education.

Researchers have found that young children often make "confusion errors" in judging visual stimuli for sameness. That is, children are reported to treat as "just the same" stimuli that are not identical in all respects. Explanations of these confusion errors have focussed on separate aspects of children's performance: language development (e.g., acquisition of relational terms), or perceptual and cognitive development (e.g., visual scanning or selection of criteria! features). The latter appear more successful in explaining the types of errors manifested. For instance, Taylor (1973) found that children, judging sameness among schematic faces, consistently correctly matched particular features and confused others, and later evidence (Wales, pers. comm., 1974) suggested their responses may be affected by the presence or absence of a visual frame around the face .The present series of experiments investigated potential influences on judgments of sameness among sets of schematic faces by children of pre-school and early school age. Variables examined included presence of a visual frame of reference around the face, type of stimulus array, task requirements, and salience of stimulus features relative to each other. Initial results confirmed that, in tasks like matching-from-sample or pair-comparison, children systematically matched only certain features of the faces and confused other features. Type of task (including stimulus and response variables) and presence/absence of a visual frame interacted with each other to influence the response patterns. Subsequent experiments suggested that neither objective visual salience of one stimulus feature over another, nor selection of a visual criterial attribute, satisfactorily accounted for the observed response patterns. A more likely contributor was subjective weighting of features on grounds of their contextually-afforded significance. Faces were not compared feature-by-feature; instead, the criterion seemed to be sameness of affective expression conveyed. It is argued that many of the confusion errors were not due simply to linguistic or perceptual immaturity. Rather, in circumstances where adults take "same" to refer to identity across all features, the children took it as "same kind of thing": their responses reflected their bases for classifying the faces (i.e., by affective content) rather than ability to judge identity. Having judged unidentical faces as the same, a considerable number of children indicated in justifying their judgments that while certain features were the same, others were not. Thus they appeared able to understand and use "same" in its various adult senses, but interpreted the task instructions differently from adults.

The relationship between a preschool child's level of intelligence, as measured by the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test (Form L-M), and his ability to perform classification tasks is investigated. The child's ability to generalize or to spontaneously apply previously learned concepts to similar but not identical tasks is assessed. The sample is composed of 43 three and four year old children who range from average to superior intelligence. It was originally hypothesized that those children having superior I.Q. scores would spontaneously apply learned concepts to new situations with or without the aid of prompting. Those children having the lower I.Q. scores were expected to require prompting before learned concepts would be applied in novel situations. The results were not completely as predicted. While the four year old groups generally followed the predicted pattern, the three year old groups showed some variation from the pattern predicted. The higher I.Q. three-year-olds made strong gains when prompted, whereas the lower I.Q. level group exhibited only losses when prompted. With the four-year-olds, there was little difference between the prompted and the non-prompted higher I.Q. group, whereas the lower I.Q. group receiving prompting did as well as or better than the non-prompted group. In either instance, age was found to be a major limiting factor. While not allowing for a parsimonious interpretation the results do indicate the usefulness of two hypotheses, spontaneity and optimal use, in accounting for differences in the transfer abilities of the preschool children. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

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