Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

The papers included here are based on a 1971 symposium held at the annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association in San Francisco. The first three papers report the results of research carried out over the last few years at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning. Levin's paper focuses on the effectiveness of…

The current experiment compared the development of encoding preferences in learning disabled children and non-disabled children. Both learning disabled (LD) and non-learning disabled (non-LD) boys from grades 2 and 6 were given a false recognition task. To measure the relative dominance of attributes encoded by the two groups at the two ages,…

Two experiments examined the origins of joint visual attention in 6- to 11-month-olds with a training procedure. Results indicated that joint visual attention does not reliably appear prior to 10 months; from about 8 months, a gaze-following response can be learned; and simple learning is not sufficient as the mechanism through which joint…

Subjects from kindergarten-age to adult participated in four experiments. In order to view the stimuli, subjects in three experiments activated lights in viewing boxes; in the fourth experiment, stimulus fixations were measured using a corneal reflection technique. Results supported the view that visual observing is controlled by cognitive…

Examined contributions of cognitive processing speed, short-term memory capacity, and attention to infant visual recognition memory. Found that infants who showed better attention and faster processing had better recognition memory. Contributions of attention and processing speed were independent of one another and similar at all ages studied--5,…

Research on adult memory for nonverbal representations has found a significant age-related decrement in performance. To investigate age differences in adult locational versus featural information in visual memory, 90 adult women (29 young women with a mean age of 21; 30 middle aged women with a mean age of 43; and 31 older women with a mean age of…

Visual processing of televised information was compared among 85 Japanese and 111 American boys and girls at the kindergarten and 4th-grade levels. The literatures on cognition and learning indicate that language and child rearing factors are more conducive to the development of iconic processing skills in Japanese children than in American…

A study investigated the concept of visual memory and its relationship to the spelling process by examining the attempts of a group of Australian elementary school children to spell a selection of words containing silent consonants. Subjects, 360 second, third, and fourth grade students divided into three spelling ability groups, were given 20…