Proportion compatible manipulations are often used to index strategic processes in selective attention tasks. Here, a subtle confound in proportion compatible manipulations is considered. Specifically, as the proportion of compatible trials increases, the ratio of complete repetitions and complete alternations to partial repetitions increases on…

How do children learn math--and why do some children struggle with it? The answers are in "Number Sense and Number Nonsense," a straightforward, reader-friendly book for education professionals and an invaluable multidisciplinary resource for researchers. More than a first-ever research synthesis, this highly accessible book brings math…

Tested the model which posits that heart-rate deceleration and respiratory sinus arrhythmia are indices of infant attention. Infants studied cross-sectionally at 14, 20, and 26 weeks of age were presented with complex patterns on a TV screen which were accompanied by an "interrupting stumulus". (Author/BN)

Little is known about the academic processing speed (i.e., rapid automatic naming and academic fluency) of children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) served in public school settings. A cross-sectional design was used to investigate the (a) percentage of K-12 students with EBD served in public school settings with…

Involving children three and four years of age, studies examined the basis for the difficulty of discriminating between left-right orientations of a shape in standard two-choice task. It was concluded that difficulty of left-right judgments lies in the cognitive demands of the task and is to be understood in the same terms as other problems in…

This study, involving adults with and without mental retardation and mental age-matched children, employed a lateralized presentation of Stroop color words, neutral words, and the subject's first name. Individuals with mental retardation experienced difficulty in effortful processing (inhibiting the reading response on the Stroop trials) and in…

The vigilance of young adults with and without mild mental retardation (MR) was compared, with subjects performing two memory demanding, cognitively based tests. The vigilance decrement of MR adults declined more rapidly than did the vigilance of non-MR adults, due to an interaction between target detectability and response bias, and poor target…

This study investigated the multidimensional information underlying accurate speech perception as processed by children with mild to severe hearing impairments. Results suggested that the auditory dimension has a normal strength-of-processing level (thus normally distracting) but that the linguistic dimension has an underdeveloped…

This paper selectively reviews research on event-related potentials (ERPs) during cognitive processing among children with attention deficit disorder. Research indicates that performance deficits during sustained attention are coupled with reduced amplitude of the P3B component of the ERP, which may be increased with stimulants. P3B latency and…

Child positive affect and task orientation in response to cognitively demanding puzzle tasks were assessed at two time points separated by 12 months in children with mild mental retardation and mental age and chronological age matched controls (ages 1-5 years). Results suggested correlates of motivation were similar for children with mild mental…

Experiments were conducted on the speed of encoding differences between 15 school-age individuals with and 15 individuals without mental retardation, while retaining a full memory load or half memory load. Subjects with mental retardation allocated fewer attentional resources to encoding, even though encoding may require more of their resources…

Twenty-four children (aged 7-16 years) with seizure disorders (SD) were compared to 30 children with diabetes mellitus (DB) and 30 children with no chronic illness. Using a variety of assessment devices, the children were compared on intelligence, academic achievement, attention, memory, perceived competence, and parents' perceptions of child and…

Thirty young and 10 elderly adults were assessed on orienting auditory attention, in a mixed-modal condition in which stimuli were either auditory or visual. Findings suggest that the mechanisms involved in orienting attention operate in audition and that individuals may allocate their processing resources among multiple sensory pools. (Author/JDD)

Determines whether early hemispheric differences exist in tactual processing by testing infants and preschoolers on six cross-modal tasks. Results are the first to demonstrate a left-hand superiority for information processing in children as young as two years. (Author/AS)

Surveys research on programmed instruction, questions, and feedback in instruction to identify guidelines for developing computer assisted instruction. The most important guidelines identified are those related to use of questions as attention, coding, and rehearsal devices, and those related to corrective feedback. (MBR)