Rhesus monkeys were trained and tested in visual and auditory list-memory tasks with sequences of four travel pictures or four natural/environmental sounds followed by single test items. Acquisitions of the visual list-memory task are presented. Visual recency (last item) memory diminished with retention delay, and primacy (first item) memory…

Subjects looked at two optically superimposed video screens. They were required to selectively look at two episodes and monitor significant action taking place. Results showed difficulty in monitoring two episodes at once and that selective viewing does not involve special mechanisms to reject unwanted information. (Author/DEP)

Reports on an experiment designed to study the role of letter stems in the identification of printed words. The stemmed letters b,d,g,h,l,p and t were used. Results showed that the suppression of the letter's body has more detrimental effects on identification than the suppression of the stem. (Author/RM)

This synthesis of the research on direct manipulation interfaces explores the nature of directness in computer interfaces and demonstrates that the concept of directness is complex, including two gulfs--for execution and evaluation--and two kinds of mappings--semantic mappings and referential distance. Examination of the complexities of the…

The acquisition of information from pictures and the relationship between canonical orientation and the function of objects were studied. Twenty introductory educational psychology students experienced a set of five common objects, three different functional uses, and four possible orientations for each object. The results analyzed for one…

One theoretical model for understanding the visual event suggests that a visual event has both a surface (descriptive) and a deeper (experience) level of understanding. Both levels are needed to comprehend and appreciate images, with each level affecting the other. A person's perspective is an important part of the visual event, which depends upon…

Recognition memory performances of preschool children were compared in nine combinations of visual-only, verbal-only, and combined visual-verbal presentation test conditions. Subjects generally performed at a high level of correct responding. Verbal-only presentation resulted in less correct recognition than did either visual-only or combined…

Recent theories of verbal memory have hypothesized that memory for a stimulus is not represented by a unitary memory trace, but rather by a coding on several attributes of the event. The present experiment tested the differential forgetting hypothesis in a unique way. Words were presented either visually (V) or auditorally (A) in a continuous…

This study tested the assimilation of an auditory-visual stimulus configuration in 32 infants aged 15 to 16 weeks. The infants' discrimination of matched and mismatched auditory-visual stimuli indicated that infants by 4 months of age are capable of constructing bimodal schemata. (JMB)

Examines effects of audio and visual redundancy on recall and story understanding in television news. Indicates that college students who viewed voice-over news stories varying in amount of redundancy showed higher auditory recall and story understanding in the high-redundancy condition than in the lower redundancy conditions. Visual recall shows…

A new theory linking information extraction patterns to the visual perception of direction and extent is presented. Seven demonstration experiments employ predictions from efferent considerations to create a new set of illusions of direction and extent and to demonstrate new predictable variations in the magnitude of some classical illusion…

Examines an avant-garde illustrated book and suggests that "deviant" books urge a kind of reading that gives visibility to the text and seeks out relationships created between two volumes--the book and its words. (DF)

Examines the relationship between preschool children's (n = 96) cognitive processing of video (V) and audio (A) information on television under four conditions: A/V match, A/V mismatch, V alone, and A alone. Results suggest that in regular television programs the video material simply appears to be more salient and more memorable than the audio…

Response patterns of deaf and hearing children in matching visual stimuli employing the dimensions of color, size, orientation, and form were compared. (KW)