Piaget and plasticine: Who's right about conservation?

Comments on the article by J. Macnamara and G. Austin (see record 1994-05070-001) suggesting that Piaget seriously misinterpreted the significance of children's documented difficulties in correctly responding to tasks involving conservation of quantity. It is shown that Macnamara and Austin make some basic errors in their analysis of the Piagetian position and that their alternative theory of how children learn to conserve is both inconsistent with empirical evidence and epistemologically untenable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intelligence and abstraction réfléchissante in Piaget's theory of cognitive development.

Discusses J. MacNamara's (1976) claim that Piaget's theory of cognitive development is circular, intelligence being introduced in the guise of abstraction réfléchissante to explain its own formation. In addition, the role of abstraction réfléchissante and the meaning and bases of intelligence are examined. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Can pigeons really make transitive inferences?

L. von Fersen et al (see record 1991-29523-001) claimed that pigeons are able to make transitive inferences that are logically comparable to the kinds of transitive inferences that have been examined in children. Without putting their methodology or their results into question, analysis of the reinforcement conditions they used indicates that what was actually examined was not transitive inference and that this study does not provide evidence that pigeons are in fact capable of transitive inference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Theoretical Investigation of the Role of AlR3 as Cocatalyst

In the present paper, we study the role of AlR₃ (R = CH₃, Cl) as cocatalyst for the Ziegler–Natta reaction. DFT-GGA calculations show that the cocatalyst facilitates the reduction of the titanium atoms by means of an exchange between the R and Cl ligands. The reductions of the alkylated species of titanium are thermodynamically favorable.     

Hartree–Fock periodic study of the chemisorption of small molecules on TiO2 and MgO surfaces

We present ab initio periodic Hartree–Fock calculations (CRYSTAL program) of the adsorption of small molecules on TiO₂ and MgO. These may be molecular or dissociative, depending on the acidic and basic properties of the molecules in gas phase and of the nature of the surface oxide. For the molecular adsorption, the molecules are adsorbed as bases on Ti(+IV) sites, the adsorption energies correlate with the proton affinities. The dissociations on the surface correlate with the gas phase cleavages of the molecule; they also depend on the surface oxide; the oxygen atom of MgO, in spite of its large charge, is poorly reactive and dissociation on MgO is not favorable.

The surface hydrosyl of MgO are more basic than the O of the lattice and water is not dissociated under adsorption. As experimentally observed, NH₃ adsorbs preferentially on TiO₂ and CO₂ on MgO. However, this difference of reactivity should not be expressed in terms of acid vs basic behavior, but in terms of hard and soft acidity. MgO surface is a “soft” acidic surface that reacts preferentially with the soft base, CO₂.

Another important factor is the adsorbate–adsorbate interaction: favorable cases are the sequence of H-bonds for the hydroxyl groups resulting from the water dissociation and the mode of adsorption for the ammonium ions. Lateral interactions also force the adsorbed CO₂ molecules to bend over the surface, so that their mutual orientation resembles the geometry of the CO₂ dimer.     

Familiarity effects in conditional reasoning.

Attempted to determine whether familiarity with content influences performance on conditional reasoning problems of the form "P implies Q" independently of ease of generation of specific examples of "Q and not-P." A paper-and-pencil test consisting of 4 problems in which these 2 factors were varied was administered to 488 undergraduates. For problems with easy access to instances of "Q and not-P" and for those with no such possibility, increased content familiarity resulted in higher performance levels. (5 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repeat lymphography in children with Hodgkin''s disease

In 18 pairs of fifth-grade males matched on sex, CA, and IQ, 1 was a good reader and 1 a poor reader. Each child read 8 3-sentence acquisition stories, subsequently performed a card-sorting task, and finally a recognition test consisting of 40 sentences which either were in the acquisition set or were 1 of 5 kinds of transformation. Retention was better for semantic aspects of the stories, but retention of tense was poor. Good readers mad fewer recognition errors than poor readers on new sentences which were true inferences from the acquisition list and on tests for retention of tense and number.     

Theoretical Study of the Acetonitrile Flip-Flop with the Electric Field Orientation: Adsorption on a Pt(111) Electrode Surface

The interaction of acetonitrile on Pt(111) electrode has been studied using density functional theory methods. Periodic calculations for a coverage of 0.25 show that the most stable adsorption mode of acetonitrile in UHV conditions on Pt(111) is the side-on η²(C,N) state. In this state, the short-bridge surface site is energetically preferred to the long-bridge site. The nitrogen end-on on top of a surface platinum atom is also likely to occur. An external uniform electric field introduced in the cluster models perpendicular to the surface serves to mimic the electrode potential. It makes the adsorbed molecule move and orient perpendicular to the surface. Depending on the direction of the electric field, the acetonitrile is oriented with the nitrogen atom or the methyl group toward the surface. Our results are in agreement with recent SFG experiments performed in electrochemical environments.     

Development of elementary deductive reasoning in young children.

This study examined the claim (J. Hawkins et al; see record 1984-25517-001) that young children can reason deductively with content for which "practical knowledge is irrelevant." Ss 6, 8, and 11 years of age were given a set of standard logical syllogisms and a matching set of illogical ones. Six-year-olds gave similar responses to and used similar types of justifications for both logical and illogical forms, indicating that correct performance on the former might be accounted for by a low-level matching strategy, not necessarily by deductive reasoning. A clear developmental pattern emerged, showing that the ability of children to differentiate responses to the two forms improves over this age period. However, the number of children able to explicitly describe illogicality remained small, even among 11-year-olds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)