Investigated comparisons of perceptions of drugs with perceptions of people, using the repertory grid technique. A significant result was finding a shift from seeing people as less positive and drugs as more positive when subjects shifted from a normal state of consciousness to a simulated altered state of consciousness. (Author)

The influence of frequency of occurrence of a visual stimulus on encoding processes is investigated, to discover what mechanisms allow cognitive processes to modify perceptual processes. Six experiments are described and the results are discussed. (MH)

College students were administered the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT), the Remote Associates Test (RAT), a questionnaire concerning RAT strategy, and two self-report scales. Field independent subjects were found to be significantly more creative than field dependents; and advanced strategy levels and insightful responses were significantly…

Presents a theoretical model of partial occlusion drawing, along with three experiments. Experiment one studied whether planning or scanning is involved in partial occlusion drawing, and the second explored whether group-encoding of similar objects creates a drawing problem. Experiment three tested predictions derived on the conjoint effects of…

Examines the perceptual cues used by three- and four-month-old infants to categorically distinguish perceptually similar animal species. Indicates that cues form the facial and head region provide the critical source of information that allows young infants to categorically differentiate cats and dogs and presumably a number of other animal…

Challenges conclusions about infants' cognitive processing from prior research in favor of the importance of perceptual processes and the effects of stimulus novelty and familiarization. Considers problems with the two-test habituation design of earlier studies and proposes a new methodology that eliminates those problems. Describes a study the…

Ten listeners with normal hearing and ten older adults with sensorineural hearing impairment were tested on a speech-recognition task requiring across-frequency integration of temporal speech information. Listeners with hearing impairment performed more poorly with synchronous across-frequency information, suggesting a particular difficulty…

Results of a study involving 15 mentally retarded and 15 nonretarded control subjects matched for mental age suggest that some low-level aspects of person-related (and probably object-related) perception may not involve the same high-level symbolic functions typically employed in intelligence-quotient related functions. (SLD)

This study investigated the multidimensional information underlying accurate speech perception as processed by children with mild to severe hearing impairments. Results suggested that the auditory dimension has a normal strength-of-processing level (thus normally distracting) but that the linguistic dimension has an underdeveloped…

Ten sighted adults were blindfolded and asked to find four objects in the open space of a room. A perimeter pattern, a gridlike search pattern, and a reference-point strategy were variably effective, indicating that different kinds of experience may result in different kinds of knowledge that are optimal for different spatial judgment tasks.…

Used data from infants in operant head-turning procedure to examine effects of structure and redundancy of speech context on discovery of two target syllables. Clustering strategy, which presupposes basic element of perception and aggregates these elements to form units, may complement bracketing strategy, which presupposes endpoint cues and…

Examined three possible explanations for findings that infants detect textural discrepancies based on individual features more readily than on feature conjunctions. Found that none of the proposed factors could explain 5.5-month-olds' superior processing of featural over conjunction-based textural discrepancies. Findings suggest that in infancy,…

Explores the notion of practical wisdom as an alternative to current formulations of critical thinking. Concludes that practical wisdom, unlike critical thinking, allows one to address uncertainty and ambiguity, and recognize that thinking is much more than an intellectual cognitive act of an individual. (KS)

Two studies explored the relationship between rapid auditory processing and phonological processing in 82 typical children and compared 17 children with dyslexia to controls. Children with dyslexia performed at a level similar to reading-age controls on auditory processing but obtained scores that were significantly below those of the…

Two experiments studied whether and how 5-year-olds integrate single facial features to identify faces. Results indicated that children could evaluate and integrate information from eye and mouth features to identify a face when salience of features was varied. A weighted Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception fit better than a Single Channel Model,…