Using the metaphoric story device of two tribes, one that builds their culture around words and the other which depends primarily on visual perception, this paper suggests a distinctive mental paradigm at work within the society of artists, who pursue visual literacy through graphic ideation. The author discusses his education in art and his…

This book, describing the result of extended research on how charts/graphs convey information, develops a scheme for describing/analyzing information contained in graphs/charts. A psychological theory of knowledge of the reader and the mental events which occur in attempting to read a graphic display are the two focal points of the book. A…

The interactions of three factors that may be involved with the memory for pattern or sequence in visual materials were investigated in this study: (1) arbitrariness of representation; (2) task; and (3) ability of students. The subjects, who were 29 graduate students in education, were pretested for general ability and randomly assigned to four…

A study assessed the role of orthographic structure in college students' perceptual recognition and judgment of letter strings. Lexical status, word frequency, bigram frequency, log bigram frequency, and regularity of letter sequencing were orthogonally varied across a series of experiments. Six-letter words and their anagrams were used as test…

In a study involving creative spelling, 300 kindergarten children and one first grader used computer programs to spell words in isolation and in stories they wrote. As the children made progress toward writing words in conventional spelling, they developed phonological spelling strategies similar to those that have previously been reported for…

Chapter 1 of this report, "Introduction and General Recommendations for Eye-Movement Research and Instrumentation," discusses research priorities; encouraging and supporting theories, models, or simulations of information processing; and improved instrumentation in the field of visual information processing. Chapter 2, "Summary of…

This project was concerned with the topic of elaborative activity and learning efficiency. "Elaboration" is regarded as an hypothetical process, internal to the learner, which consists of conceiving an event that can serve as a common semantic referent for elements that are initially disparate. The objective of the project was to examine…

Describes a study of fifth grade students' ability to process information from a play, and compares the results to related information from television research. (JC)

Visual literacy encompasses the ability to generate and make use of visual images to develop or clarify ideas, as a tool both for conveying information and for creative expression. The usefulness of visual thinking in study skills, problem solving, and living in an increasingly visual society is stressed. (Author/JDD)

Examines modality differences in preschoolers' ability to recognize or recall temporally related events and extends Ward and Wackman's model by evaluating whether the assumed "visual viewing style" applies to preschoolers' processing of temporal relations. Results demonstrated that temporally related events were remembered more…

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,…

Discusses three experiments conducted with undergraduates to investigate important characteristics of mental models, their influence on task performance, and instructional strategies facilitating their formation. Results suggest that dynamic visual displays are more effective than static visual displays for teaching electronic troubleshooting…

The relation between perceptual organization and categorization processes in 3- and 4-month-olds was explored. The question was whether an invariant part abstracted during category learning could interfere with Gestalt organizational processes. A 2003 study by Quinn and Schyns had reported that an initial category familiarization experience in…

Current issues in educational communications and technology are addressed in this collection of 48 papers, in which research reports predominate. Topics discussed include factors related to the learner, e.g., field dependence/independence, learning strategies, information processing, spatial ability, cognitive style, and cognitive strategies.…

A study investigated the learning impact of audio, visual, and audiovisual information channels in televised messages among preschool children. The messages consisted of a half-hour videotape of "Sesame Street" episodes (presented to 48 subjects), and a videotape of an intact "Mister Roger's Neighborhood" program (presented to…