Elementary school students and adults were presented with a paired comparison task of visual complexity in which contour and presence or absence of structure in the patterns were manipulated. Results indicated that complexity judgments of all subjects were affected by the presence of structure at lower levels of contour. (GO)

The hypothesis that perceptual development proceeds from less to greater dimensional separability was tested by giving a speeded classification task to first and fourth graders. Results supported the hypothesis that development proceeds toward greater flexibility of attention rather than simply toward increasing separability. (Author/DB)

Experiments on the development of face recognition showed that young children can ignore featural information when it has no discriminative value and attend to the internal attributes of the face and indicated a lack of developmental differences in face recognition styles, as well as a tendency to rely on configurational information more than…

Investigates the different levels in the visual system at which laterality effects may be elicited in children and adults in five different experiments. (LLK)

Thirty-two Hawaiian children in grades two, four, and seven participated in a study designed to test an ethnographic observation that rural Hawaiian children are highly sensitive to movement and location in their visual environment, and also to test the effect on the children of using Pidgin versus Standard English (S.E.). The children were…

A study of 300 children in kindergarten, grade 2, and grade 6 found that background music improved visual discrimination task performance at the youngest and middle ages and had no effect on the oldest participants. On a square identification task, background music had no influence on easy and difficult tasks but lowered performance on…

Explores the effect of continuous training on tonal and auditory memory. Does so by comparing the auditory short-term memory skills of English and American children, ages five, six, and seven. (RKM)

Twenty children, aged 7-12, with severe visual impairments completed a series of visual tasks requiring interpretation, analysis, manipulation, and visual motor coordination. Findings are discussed in terms of total performance, individual task performance, performance of younger versus older children, and performance of good versus poor readers.…

Preschool, second-, and sixth-grade children performed developmentally gradated, easy and difficult visual discrimination tasks in a quiet room or with one of two levels of extraneous auditory stimulation. Subjects' errors, response latencies, and glances away from the task were recorded. (Author/RH)

Described are three experiments which probed children's sensitivity to structure or organization in visual patterns. Each experiment employed a different paradigm (complexity judgment, discrimination learning, recognition learning, and memory) in order to tap different aspects of children's use of structural information. Subjects were children in…

Reports the results of two experiments dealing with children's visual and tactual performance. In the first task, after several presentations of a series, the tactual group made almost errorless discriminations. But with memory demands, tactual performance became poorer than visual performance. Found a large developmental difference. (JAC)

Forty students, grades 4 and 8, were given match-to-sample tests on Western art, to gauge their ability to recognize paintings by the same artist. Eighth-graders performed reliably better than fourth-graders, and their matching justifications were more advanced. Prior artistic experiences improved style sensitivity. (SJL)