Abstract not found

The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families " of factors—cognitive, social, and biological—that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses. Since the turn of the century, psycholegal scholars have examined the suggestibility of children's testimony in an effort to determine whether they would be credible witnesses. A major issue in this research concerns the degree to which heightened

It seems to be a common feeling that animals learn to see, and this feeling, together with the reemergence of computer learning paradigms that mimic many forms of human learning, has raised hopes that learning is the key to the computer vision problem. Indeed, it seems clear that Nature does not "program" all our visual capabilities into the genome, and we certainly know that programming a computer with a closed-form solution to the vision problem is a daunting task. This aim of this informal and elementary report (basically a term paper) is to cast doubt on the idea that biological systems learn to see. The complex process of development, beginning at fertilization and ending with a mature individual, could be considered to have genetic ("nature") and learning ("nurture") processes as logical endpoints or opposite poles. This report mostly considers what goes on between those endpoints, and is meant to raise the possibility that some of the least understood processes in biology are re...

Applying several names to an entity (polynomy) reflects the ability to categorize entities in different ways. Two experiments demonstrate preschoolers ' abilities to apply multiple labels to representational objects and to people. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds labeled representational objects and verified labels for story characters. In both tasks children reliably produced or accepted several words per entity and accepted a high percentage of both class-inclusive and overlapping word pairs. These results were replicated in Experiment 2; 3- to 5-year-olds also completed appearance-reality and receptive vocabulary tests. The mean number of words produced in the labeling task was significantly related to receptive vocabulary, but not to appearance-reality performance. The results indicate that preschoolers represent an entity as belonging to multiple categories (e.g., dinosaur and crayon). Implications for cognitive and language development, particularly the appearance-reality distinctic/n and the mutual exclusivity bias, are discussed. The objects and organisms that inhabit our environment are complex and multifaceted, with many aspects and attributes. Any entity belongs to many different categories defined by particular aspects and attributes. Adults can conceptualize these categories and represent them by using a variety of words (i.e.,