Investigates the effect of the relationship between conditions at encoding (familiarization) and retrieval (test) with regard to infants' performance on a paired-comparison recognition test. Subjects were 32 male and 32 female infants between 8.7 and 10.3 months of age. (MP)

Describes a demonstration for college-level cognitive psychology classes of Miller's "Magical Number Seven" concept of the limitation of sensory capacity for processing information. Students report on the number of pennies they observed in a box after viewing the coins for two seconds. Demonstration results consistently support Miller's…

When presented visual patterns for 100-msec followed by a 100-msec patterned masker at intervals of 0, 250, 500, and 2,000 msec after the offset of the stimulus, only infants in the 2,000-msec stimulus-masker interval condition significantly fixated a novel stimulus longer than a familiar stimulus. Results suggest visual processing in infants is…

Newborn infants' fixation of a graduated series of visual stimuli significantly differed in the absence and presence of white-noise bursts. Relative to the no-sound condition, sound resulted in the infants' tendency to look more at the low-intensity visual stimulus and less at the high- intensity visual stimulus. (Author/DB)

Results of the study indicated that LD and normal children (mean age 111.4 months) process letters in words in either perceptual or imaginal modes for the attribute letter height. (Author)

Presented is experimental evidence that humans develop strong preferences for objects that become familiar through repeated exposure, even when the exposures are so degraded that they cannot be discriminated as stimuli previously seen. Implications are made regarding other studies where affective discriminations are made with very little stimulus…

Three studies investigated whether eye gaze cueing in 4-month-old infants is the result of a domain-specific module or reflects the activity of domain-general processes. In two of three experiments, infants perceived apparent motion of the pupils, and this directly elicited saccades, but only when this motion was preceded by a period of direct…

Experiments involving a total of 114 college students from Indiana and Israel demonstrate that the initial analysis of visual objects into features from different dimensions strongly constrains postperceptual processes of response selection. A model of response selection is proposed to account for the findings. (SLD)

Neuropsychological findings relevant to the question of whether visual imagery is visual or perceptual are reviewed and compared to cognitive psychology theories. Imagery does not appear to represent information acquired through visual sensory channels; rather, it seems to use some of the same neural representational machinery as does vision. (SLD)

A total of 46 preschoolers were asked to decide whether two rows of drawings of objects were exactly the same. Results revealed that preschoolers can gather information systematically, and that by age four, the majority are producing, and benefitting from, a strategy that is very efficient for same-different tasks. (RH)

Describes 4 experiments examining 10-month-old infants' causal event perception. Results from all experiments indicated that infants perceived causality of simple events by associating a specific agent with a causal action. These results provide more support for an information-processing view of causal perception than for a view that explains…

Steps aside from conventional ideas about diagrams to examine how they work. Brings to bear ideas from a perceptual psychologist, a communication theorist, and a philosopher. Introduces the papers in this special issue as diagrams for worldmaking. (SR)

Tested 8 individuals with mental retardation or autism and 16 individuals without either condition for their ability to detect a form in a random-dot kinematogram. The presence and generalization of training effects in those who initially did not meet criterion performance suggests that initial failures may be due in part to postperceptual…

Argues that phonemes play a central role in speech recognition. Presents simulations showing how the recognition of nonsense syllables can be very well predicted from the recognition of their component phonemes. Suggests that a model in which syllables are factored into their phonemes can account for the results of multidimensional phonetic…

A large orthographic neighborhood (N) facilitates lexical decision for central and left visual field/right hemisphere (LVF/RH) presentation, but not for right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LH) presentation. Based on the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, this asymmetric N effect is explained by differential activation patterns at the…