In a series of six experiments, undergraduate college students visually imagined letters or words and then classified as rapidly as possible the imagined letters for some physical property such as vertical height. This procedure allowed for a preliminary assessment of the temporal parameters of visual imagination. The results delineate a number of…

Eight-year-old children were trained on length or weight relationships between adjacent members of a five-item series of colored objects. Visual feedback was provided. Results indicated more salient visual feedback reduced learning effort for length but not for weight comparisons. Encoding differences found in another experiment were used to…

The ability of 16 school-age children with visual impairments and their sighted peers to recognize faces was compared. Although no intergroup differences were found in ability to identify entire faces, the visually impaired children were at a disadvantage when part of the face, especially the eyes, was not visible. Degree of visual acuity also…

How can cognitive load in visual displays of computer simulations be optimized? Middle-school chemistry students (N = 257) learned with a simulation of the ideal gas law. Visual complexity was manipulated by separating the display of the simulations in two screens (low complexity) or presenting all information on one screen (high complexity). The…

Spatial skills are known to vary widely among normal individuals. This project was designed to address whether these individual differences are differentially related to large-scale environmental learning from route (ground-level) and survey (aerial) perspectives. Participants learned two virtual environments (route and survey) with limited…

Event-related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded to both auditory and visual stimuli from the scalps of nine autistic males and nine normal controls (all Ss between 12 and 22 years of age) to examine the differences in information processing strategies. Ss were tested on three different tasks: an auditory missing stimulus paradigm, a visual color…

The purpose of the eight studies reported in this paper was two-fold: to identify some of the relationships that exist between the unique properties of diagrams and various aspects of cognitive processes and learning, and, subsequently, to derive principles from these relationships that would direct the design and use of diagrams in the classroom.…

Gestalt theory deals with the act of thinking and the construction of concepts in a situated manner, and, therefore, could be used to study how meaning is extracted from a visual display. Using the Gestalt framework of form cues and their usage patterns in the perception of, and learning from, visual media, researchers could study frame, line…

This reports the effects of the number of relevant stimulus dimensions and figural versus verbal stimuli on the concept learning ability of college students. Results force a consideration of mediational variables in explaining this form of cognitive learning. A set of verbal materials analogous to a set of dimensionalized figural materials was…

Discusses the value of making students visually literate. Stresses the technique of visual rehearsal and offers suggestions for incorporating visual rehearsal activities into the classroom. (FL)

A comparison was made between two procedures for testing whether an alpha-numeric character, which was pattern masked to prevent awareness, could access higher-order information concerning its category. (Author)

Examines visual cognitive processes having to do with perception, the assimilation of new information, and learning by analogy, and identifies instructional strategies to control each process. Discussion of relationships between visual learning and instruction includes implications for research and design. An extensive bibliography is provided.…

The author presents findings from brain hemisphere research indicating a complex dual memory process which separately and simultaneously processes input through visual and verbal encoding strategies. He draws implications from this for educational goals, instructional methods, and student evaluation procedures. (SJL)