Provides the 2007 reports of APA's Regional Associations. Included are the annual meeting reports from the Eastern Psychological Association, Midwestern Psychological Association, New England Psychological Association, Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, Southeastern Psychological Association, Southwestern Psychological Association, and…

The importance of play in child development and the barriers that individuals with autism face regarding play skills requires us to identify specific interventions which can assist in the development of such skills. Stimulus pairing, which has been documented as a procedure by which an event comes to elicit a response by being paired with an event…

This paper selectively reviews research on the relationship between topic interest and prior knowledge, and discusses the optimal association between these variables. The paper points out that interest has a facilitating impact on learning, and at least part of this effect must be ascribed to prior knowledge. While the interest-knowledge…

A study of 141 hearing impaired students (ages 8 to 18 years) was conducted to assess how common gender neutral terms (such as "someone,""people,""student," and "child'" are understood by such students. The influence of multiple factors that might relate to hearing impaired children's processing of gender neutral terms was examined by means of a…

This study investigated the use of Pathfinder Associative Networks in assessing knowledge structures for people who learn information via computer-based tutorials. Graphical representations for a set of concepts were produced for participants who had completed a computer-based tutorial related to the concepts (novices) and for those who had no…

Against an historical backdrop, this paper summarizes four uses of intraclass correlation of importance to contemporary researchers in the behavioral sciences. First, it shows how the intraclass correlation coefficient can be used to adjust confidence intervals for statistical significance testing when data are intracorrelated and the independence…

This study examined the effectiveness of imagery to teach native English speakers to associate hiragana characters (a Japanese script) with the spoken Japanese syllables that the characters represent. Twenty-one adults in a psychology of learning class for teachers were taught to picture a hiragana character in such a way as to establish an…

Recent work in person memory combines cognitive models of memory with theories of social cognition. To examine the accuracy of person perception, 66 college students (24 males, 42 females) were administered a programmed case using 21 episodes. After 15 minutes of filler tasks, subjects were allowed free recall for 30 minutes, followed by…

A study examined the effect of variation in category dominance on retrieval latencies (and errors) from semantic memory. Subjects, 66 students enrolled in an introductory psychology course, were required to perform 6 successive retrievals from each of 18 conceptual categories. The six retrievals consisted of two successive blocks of three from…

The extent to which free play versus sequenced questioning conditions facilitates preschoolers' associative fluency was investigated in this study. Twenty-four children (12 boys and 12 girls, with a mean age of 50.7 months) were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: free play, sequenced questioning, and control. In the sequenced…

A few empirical studies of mnemonic techniques were conducted in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Then, until the 1960s, very little research was done on mnemonics. A revival of research interest in mnemonics, in the late 1960s, accompanied the general acceptability of cognitive processes as a legitimate area of research. Now we're back where we…

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence that varying types of labels have on the organization of a series of movements in memory. Subjects were presented with a series of movements on a positioning task. They were provided with numeric labels for each movement held in the series. Results indicated that labels play an important…

Ten Turkish words were used as stimuli in an exposure experiment. Twenty-five students from the University of Illinois subject pool were divided into five subgroups, differing only with respect to which stimuli occurred in which exposure conditions. After the stimuli were evaluated on 7-point "good-bad" scales, subjects completed a questionnaire…

Proposes a cognitive-neoassociationistic model to account for the effects of negative affect on the development of angry feelings and the display of emotional aggression. Summarizes psychological studies that indicate that attention to one's negative feelings can lead to a regulation of the overt effects of the negative affect. (FMW)

This paper develops a relationship between the dynamics of sexual-fantasy response and the dynamics of literary response that could be exploited by encouraging students to learn by inventing, to fantasize, and to suspend their disbelief when reading all kinds of literature. Just as sexual fantasy focuses attention on the pleasures of sexual…