Recently, several research groups studying of thinking have done very useful achivements; the study. of (conservation) concept by Piaget, J. and his followers, the representational mediation process theory by Kendler, H. H. and others.
But some experiments of thinking have many weak points from the standpoint of methodology. Some weak points of Piaget's studies are as follows;
1)(Groupement) is not ultimate principle of logical thinking. It is only a part of logical thinking.
2)(Equilibration) concept has not substantiality
3) His studies did not make clear the influ- ence of verbal behavior and conditions of teaching.
As for Kendler and others;
1) They recognized thinking only as common responses to external stimuli, but could not recognized it as a process of congnition.
Purpose:
The purpose of this study is to examine these weak points in study of thinking. The Fqllowing conditions are used in these experiments on concept formation:
1) selection of suitable materials,
2) conditions of teaching,
3) verbal behavior:
Procedure:
The subjects are 111 preschool childrens, 5-6 years old, IQ above 90 (Tanaka-Binet test). The experimental material consists of 84 wooden blocks varying in color, shape, height and size. There are six different colors: red, blue, yellow, green, white and purple; five different shapes: circles, squares, triangles, lozenges and horseshoes; two heights: tall blocks and flat blocks; and two size of top (or bottom) area: large and small blocks. All blocks were named after one of following nonsense syllables. Regardless of color and shape, EKA is all large tall figures, TAYO is all small tall ones. NERI is all large flat ones and KENT is the small flat ones. Subjects had to form such four' concepts as EKA, TAYO, NERI and KENT through classifying 12 mixed blocks.
The main results were as follows;
1) As the materials for effective concept-formation, E had to select materials by which Ss become clearly aware of their vague question about the concept of form.
2) “Reproductive-synthetic method”, which I devised, was found to be effective espcially for Ss who had some knowledge about concepts in question.
3) “Synthetic method through analysis” was considered to be one of the most reliable methods of concept formation and development, as E could recognize Ss' different developmental stages of conceptual thinking.
4) Verbal behavior-especially verbal definition of concept, was found to be one of most important conditions for concept formation.
5) In the process of concept formatios, analytic and synthetic action to materials was found to contain, at the same time, the same action of language.
6) The process of concept formation was found to proceed as follows;
1 story-telling or explanation
2 generalization through practical experience
3 incomplete conceptual analysis
4 verbal generalized conception
5 partial abstract conception
6 complete concept formation

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1. Purpose and method;
In the present study, the author examines how the cardinal number concept of metally-retarded children developes differently from the normal, each of whom he graded according to levels of MA. The contents of the experiments which were tried consist mainly of the following fields
1) one-one correspondence of discontinuous quantities (chiefly marbles) which are all homogenous in shape and size,
2) counting the-number of them,
3) counting the number of discontinous quantities (kinds of plane figures) which are heterogenous to all the appearances.
4) the equivalence and conservation of discontinuous quantities.
Sudjects are 133 retarded children of special classes and 69 normal children who attend a kindergarden and a primary school. The mental ages of the retarded are from 3 years to 10 years and those of the normal (control group) are from 3 years to 8 years,
2. Results;
Main findings may be summarized as follows,
1) There are little bifferences between the development of the retarded and that of the normal, both in the experiments of one-one correspondence and in those of counting the number of discontinuous quantities which are homogenous.
2) But in the experiments of counting the total. number of plane figures, the results of the retarded is inferior to those of the normal. The developmental gap between two groups of children grows more evident as mental age increases. Besides the acquisition of conservation by the retarded is significantly lower than that. bythe normal of the same MA, losing one to twoyears of MA is common.
3) According to the results mentioned above, it is suggested that, even though the mental agesofboth groups of children are the same, thenumber concepts, of mentally retarded children. does not always develop at the same rate as the normal, and their judgments of number are: more dominated by perceptual configurations thank the normal.

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Experiments reported here consist of two parts. The first part is concerned with the effects of verbal instructions in the construction of geometric figures and the second with the effects in rule findings in sequences of letters, numerals, and figures arranged according to given rules.
The instructions may be thought more effective when they are presented on the basis of the concrete experience (excercise and retrace of the solution processes) of the subjects than in the case of presenting them only in oral form. Discussions of this topic are given.
Discussions are also given of the relationships between the verbal instructions and the concrete experiences, and the developmental factors, by con- Zucting the experiments on two levels of age of subjects (the sixth graders of elementary school and the, second graders of junior high school).
The results are summarized as follows:
1. Generally, the verbal instructions regarding the procedures and cues of a solution had positive effects on both the figure construction and the rule finding tasks.
2. Repetition and confirmation of the verbal instructions in the course of the exercise and the retrace on solution processes tended to increase the effectiveness of the itstructions.
3. The effects of the instructions were larger in the rule finding than in the figure constructions, suggesting the pertinence of the verbal instructions to the modes of behavior required to the problem solving. Generally speaking, the verbal instructions could be more effective if their contents and modes of presentation were in close correspondence to the solution behavior.
4. In both of the two kinds of tasks, the effects of instructions tended to decrease in the older subjects. In addition, the instructional effects were not always positive in the rule findings in the junior high school subjects. These results could be interpreted as showing that it should be necessary to vary the contents and the modes of presentation of the instructions in accordance with the subjects' developmental stages in order to make the instructions effective

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The present study was concerned with the avoidance of inappropriately sex-typed objects by kindergarten children as a consequence of observing an adult model inhibit sex-inappropriate responses. Eighty kindergarten children, 40 boys and 40 girls, participated as Ss. Children of each sex was assig-ned to one of four subgroups of a 2 × 2 design involving two age groups (younger vs. older Ss) and two conditions (experimental vs. control groups). The ages of the younger group ranged from 5-0 to 5-4 ; the ages. of the older group, from 6-0 to 6-4. In the initial phase of the experiment, Ss in the experimental group were individually exposed to the adult model of their own sex for two minutes. Ss in the control group did not odserve the model during this time. While playing with neutral toys inte nsively, the model twice approached inappropriate ly sex-typed toys with inhibiting verbal statements (e. g.,“These are nice toys, but I'm not going to play with them. They are all for girls. Boys won't play with this kind of toys.”). The present study, therefore, differed from previous studies which attempted, to demonstrate the model's inhibitory effects with respect to the presentation of the model. In most previous studies, Ss observed a “deviated” model being punished. Immediately following this treatment, S was, offered two groups of toys, sexinappropriate and neutral toys, and allowed to play with them for seven minutes in the absence of E. S's play behavior was observed and recorded once every 10 seconds by judges who observed the session through a one-way mirror. Thus, each S was observed 42 times. Two different scores were obtained from the observation: latency and percent-inappropriate scores. Latency scores consisted of the number of time intervals elapsing before S was observed to look at, came close to, or touched a sex inappropriate toy. Percent-inappropriate scores consisted of the number of interval in which S looked at, was close to, or touched' a sex inappropriate toy divided by the number of intervals spent with all toys.
The major findings of the study were the following:
1) The latency data, in general, showed that those Ss who observed the model approached and touched sex inappropriate toys with significantly longer latencies than those Ss who did not observe the model. The percent-inappropriate data indicated that the means of this measure were significantly smaller for Ss in the experimental groups than the means for Ss in the control conditions. These results were interpreted to suggest that control over the sex inappropriate responses may be vicariously acquired both by the observation of the model inhibiting sex-inappropriate responses and the observation of incompatible model's behaviors.
2) Differential effects of the model for two age levels were noted only in the latency data of boys. The younger boys who observed the model approached and touched feminine toys with significantly longer latencies than the younger boys in the control group. A similar difference between the experimental and control groups was not found for the older boys. Such differential effects of the model were not observed in the girls data.

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[in Japanese]

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The main purpose of this study was to see the r elation of English achievement and capacity of using constraint of contexts on immediate memory. Artificial English sentences were used as materials, each of which contained 10 words and graded by the order of apprwdmation to English, and the subjects wrote them down immediately after presentation, when two ways of scoring were employed, namely letter score (L. 5.) and placement score (P. 5.).The subjects were 80 freshmen of high school arfor each of them the following data were obtained as reference materials.
Test experiments
1) rote learning test
2) words recalling test
3) bonanzagram test
Reference data
1) school records of English 2) IQ
To see the types of the ways of memorizing, contents of memory were devided into structural and non-structural.part and P. S. was regarded as the index of the former.
Then calculating the the correlation coefficient between non-structural part and L. S:, there was no correlation for the subjects as a whole, but stratifying them according to English achievement, upper 1/4 showed negative value of correlation and when materials were restricted to high orders of approximation, upper 1/2 showed negative correlation.
These results show that there is a difference in the capacity of using the constraint of contexts between an upper group and a lower group. But from the fact that the upper 1/4 showed high negative correletion, for low order materials, it is considered that especially excellent students can give a strained meaning to the material which has not a logical structure in itself. This fact shows one of the characteristics of learning foreign languages.

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The present study was so designed as to compare scores of the measures of the cancellation testsuch as amount of performance before resting (A) and after resting (B), error rate,(A & B), efficiency (A & B), rate of the resting effect, and ratios of omitted numbers of 3, 6 and 8 which were set to be crossed out, in schizophrenic subjects (8) with those in normal subjects (N). Besides scores of the measures of the. Uchida-Kraepelin test such as type of work curve, amount of performance (A & B), error rate (A & B), and rate of the resting effect were added, and then the structure of factors based on correlation coefficients of these scores in Ss was compared with that in N.
The results were as follows:
1) Differences of mean scores of amount of performance (A & B), error rate (A & B), efficiency (A & B) in S and those in N were statistically significant, but there were no differences between S and N in mean scores of rate of the resting effect, and ratios of omitted numbers.
2) Four factors were extracted and rotated in S and N respectively. In S they were tentatively named as good-bad of performance of both cancellation test, and Kraepelin test, good quantity of cancellation test and bad quality of Kraepelin test, good quantity of Kraepelin test and bad quality of can tion test, and ratios of omitted numbers of 6 and 8, and in N as good-bad of performance of both tests, good quantity of cancellation test and bad quality of Kraepelin test, resting effect, and ratios omitted numbers of 6 and 8.
3) There might be little value as a psycho diagnostic measure in rate of the resting effect of cancellation test, and it seemed it was not necessary to measures distinguishing before the resting from after the resting.

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