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 1978 study (Torgesen, Bowen and Ivey) of the structure and modality variables of the Visual-Aural Digit Span (VADS) test was replicated to determine: (1) if the effects generalized across age; (2) if differences between simultaneous and sequential visually presented items were due to mode of presentation or the amount of study time; (3) the…

This study indicates that the way in which stories are presented to children (verbal versus pictorial) makes little or no difference in the children's comprehension or recall of the stories. Ninety-six kindergarten and second grade children either looked at a series of pictures (and were told they formed a story) or listened to the story through a…

INFANT SCRIBBLING ACTIVITY IS NOT SIMPLY PLAY. IT CONTRIBUTES TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF VISUAL ATTENTION AND PERCEPTION. YET, SCRIBBLING, UNLIKE WRITING IN THE COMMUNICATION SENSE, IS NOT MOTIVATED BY THE DESIRE TO INFORM, NOR TO SET DOWN THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS. THE EXPERIMENTAL HYPOTHESIS OF THIS STUDY WAS THAT THE MOTIVATIONS FOR SCRIBBLING ARE (1)…

Two experiments, designed to examine the developmental changes in the modification of visual memory by verbal information, are described in this paper. In both experiments, first, third, and fifth grade children and college students were shown slides of short episodes followed by oral questions. Questions either described or did not describe…

In order to investigate learning theories, media researchers need to explore three variables: (1) the psychological requirements of a given learning task, (2) individual differences in cognitive style, and (3) specific media characteristics. It is necessary to identify the psychological processes which underlie any specific learning task in order…

Any theory of information processing must address both what is processed and how that processing takes place. Most studies investigating variables which alter physical dimension utilization have ignored the large individual differences in selective attention or cue utilization. A paradigm was developed using an individual focus on information…

Visual and auditory stimuli were presented to children to measure symbol processing abilities. Slides which required matching the similarities in two objects in a group of three were presented. At times the matching criteria varied between function, color, and form. Reaction time was quicker when matching by color than by function, which was…

A skilled cognitive theorist might help behaviorists resolve inconsistencies found from their experimentation with imaginal mnemonics in paired-associate and serial learning tasks. Iconic cognition which relegates verbal processes to short-term storage and output systems is inadequate to explain the verbal coding and elaboration processes…

This study explores the effect of visual stimuli on second language vocabulary development. An experiment performed at Georgetown University postulates the hypothesis that concrete target words learned through translation and visual aids should offer better learning than the same words learned through translation alone. Findings are determined…

Reports on a study that investigated the span of letter recognition (the region of text from which letter information is used during a fixation) for good and poor fifth-grade readers during a reading task. (HOD)

In two experiments, first and fourth grade subjects performed a speeded card sorting task with either integral or nonintegral dimensions. The dimensions were arranged so that subjects sorted on three types of task: (1) single dimension, (2) correlated dimensions, and (3) orthogonal dimensions. (Author/MS)

Compares the meanings of the English adverb "then," that is, at that time and after that, to their lexical equivalents in Hungarian and Norwegian, drawing conclusions in the spirit of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory. Neither Hungarian nor Norwegian has a word that, like the English "then," neutralizes the distinction…

The functional architecture of the verbal processing resource system was studied by testing aphasic patients in Canada and Boston for their abilities to use syntactic structure in sentence comprehension in isolation and under dual-task conditions. Results indicate that the processing resource system underlying syntactic processing is separate from…

Notes that little agreement exists as to which factors influencing academic outcomes for second-language learners are of primary importance. The study hypothesizes that second-language learners in immersion situations undergo an attention shift away from auditory system processing and towards visual information processing. (59 references)…