A number of thought experiments are cited, some well-known, some not. These illustrate the power of thought experiments. Other examples are given that show some of the dangers. As well as examples from the science, some examples of visual reasoning from mathematics are also presented, again with an eye to illustrating their promise and perils.…

In this cross-sectional study, we investigated whether the combination of the presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits and emotional deficits to distressing stimuli, assessed by a computerized dot-probe task, enhanced the statistical prediction of aggression and delinquency in a sample of 88 detained and predominantly African-American (68%)…

The location of an object is often described by spatially relating it to a known landmark. The spatial terms used in such descriptions can provide various types of information. For example, projective terms such as "above" indicate direction but not distance, whereas proximal terms such as "near" indicate distance but not direction. Previous…

Literacy is an issue for many low-income audiences. Using visual information processing theories, the goal was improving readability of a food behavior checklist and ultimately improving its ability to accurately capture existing changes in dietary behaviors. Using group interviews, low-income clients (n = 18) evaluated 4 visual styles. The text…

Developmental studies of face processing have revealed age-related changes in how infants allocate neurophysiological resources to the face of a caregiver and an unfamiliar adult. We hypothesize that developmental changes in how infants interact with their caregiver are related to the changes in brain response. We studied 6-month-olds because this…

The ability to allocate attentional resources to relevant aspects of a stimulus event is a critical skill needed for efficient information processing. Evidence suggests that this ability to focus on relevant information without interference is dependent on the nature of the stimulus structure of the information to be processed. To test the…

This study questioned whether children's relative inability to use the two cerebral hemispheres independently contributes to their difficulty with the simultaneous execution of conflicting tasks. Two naming tasks involving the identification of upright and inverted letters were employed; conditions differed according to how the letter pairs were…

The acquisition of visual information, which occurs during eye fixations, involves two processes: registration (visual information becoming available to the brain) and utilization (visual information being used to further text comprehension). Registration occurs at the beginning of a fixation, while at least four possible patterns describe the…

This study of the effects of practice on children's perceptual judgments investigates the validity of the distinctive features hypothesis and the schemata hypothesis by comparing performance on discrimination tasks using familiar stimuli (letters of the alphabet) with a variety of transformations held constant over four massed practice conditions.…

A research study was designed to test the relationship between the number of eye fixations and amount of learning as determined by a criterion referenced posttest. The study sought to answer the following questions: (1) Are differences in eye movement indices related to the posttest score? (2) Do differences in eye movement indices of subjects…

This study was designed to investigate whether problem solving inefficiency in preschool children is the result of subprocess deficiencies in the children's use of logical rules and to assess the influence of 2 mnemonic components (encoding and rehearsal) on problem solving ability. The study subjects, 108 preschool children, were presented with…

This report is the first in a two-part series introducing an interactive activation model of context effects in perception. A model for the perception of letters in words and other contexts is described and applied to a number of experiments. It is proposed that the model accounts for (1) the perceptual advantage for letters in words compared to…

This report is the second in a two-part series introducing an interactive activation model of context effects in perception. In the first part, a model for the perception of letters in words and other contexts was described and applied to a number of experiments. This second part applies the same model to a number of new experiments designed to…