Visual categorization is ubiquitous in many professions, yet training programs are typically time- and effort-intensive. This work focuses on developing methods to improve human learning and performance on challenging visual categorization tasks, e.g., bird species identification, diagnostic dermatology. As part of the general approach, we infer…

Previous research suggests that model competence does not emerge until relatively late in infancy (20-26 months). Development was systematically analyzed within 3 key areas--count noun learning, dual representation, and categorization--hypothesized to support the emergence of model competence in the second year. In an object-handling preferential…

Early acquisition of right and left as absolute concepts does not seem to be related to early mastery of right and left as relative concepts among the Hausa. (Author)

Reviews the research literature on the abilities of infants to categorize visual information on dot patterns; schematic faces; hue; and orientation. (HOD)

Infants 8.5 and 9.5 months of age were tested for ability to determine the location of an object hidden in one of two covered containers before their left-right positions were reversed. Only the older infants provided with different colored covers to their containers were able to do this task. (Author/DB)

The research experiments on relational learning in young children contained in this report were guided by two major goals: (1) to examine the extent of conceptual transfer in preschool children, and (2) to explore the relation of both "acquisition" and "transfer" to chronological development. The performance of preschool…

A theory for the visual and cognitive processing, which accounts for slower naming of pictures than reading of words, is introduced. Two experiments assessed the differences distinguishing word reading and picture naming, using 58 undergraduates. The coding of the mind is neither intrinsically linguistic nor imagistic; it is abstract. (TJH)

Two experiments examined pigeons' generalization to intermediate forms following training of concept discriminations. In Experiment 1, the training stimuli were sets of images of dogs and cats, and the transfer stimuli were head/body chimeras, which humans tend to categorize more readily in terms of the head part rather than the body part. In…

Four paradoxes appear in research on learning to read: (1) the ability to name letters is a good predictor of reading readiness, yet letter-naming training does not help children learn how to read; (2) visual discrimination is often better in poor readers than in good readers; (3) learning to read two languages is easier than learning to read one;…