Older adults are significantly slower than young adults in the naming response in the Stroop Color Word Interference Test. Hypotheses attempting to explain this age-related difference in a perceptual-cognitive task have included orthogenic principle, response-competition, and cautiousness. This study examines whether there are any significant…

Meanings given to the term "perception" are discussed in this paper and two categories of perception theories having implications for instructional media research are identified. One category is described as extroverted because it includes theories primarily concerned with characteristics of external stimuli and the influence that the…

Despite external changes such as those of magnitudes, the functional properties of the visual system also improve with increased age. According to Jean Piaget's centration/decentration theory, the process of perceptual development might continue until adulthood and even after. However, perceptual development should not be understood in all of its…

The processing of mental structures in perception appears to be serial, in that viewers can fill in missing parts from an impoverished stimulus following a top down process. To investigate the effects of unfamiliarity, complexity, and legibility on object and layout perception of unfamiliar stimuli, ten subjects were shown one of four ribbon…

Witkin's concepts of field dependence-independence and restructing are discussed with reference to studies in Russia and in the Netherlands. These concepts are related to differences in style of perception and to success on both cognitive tasks and social tasks. It is suggested that restructing abilities may be trained and restructing ability may…

Competence in action perception seems to be achieved very early in life. Because research has indicated that competent perceivers of action must be able to discriminate breakpoints in behavior, then recognition memory for breakpoints should be superior to that for nonbreakpoints at all ages where competence in action perception exists. Two studies…

This paper presents findings regarding the role of youth's moment to moment thinking and state of mind in determining perception. These findings, along with discoveries about innate resiliency and an understanding of the underlying principles that describe how thoughts become perception, have demonstrated efficacy in empowering youth to regain…

The impact of age effects on nonverbal memory for auditory or tactual patterns has been largely neglected in research studies. The effects of age on nonverbal memory were investigated by comparing subjects (N=120), divided by age decades into six groups (N=20), through tests using visual, auditory, and tactual items which were resistant to verbal…

This research study was designed to examine the attitudes of preschool children toward the disabled, evaluate the children's awareness and understanding of physical impairment, and examine the possibility of modifying preschool children's attitudes towards disabled children. Subjects were 102 children, 3-5 years of age, enrolled in preschools or…

This paper offers a conceptual model or theory that synthesizes previous research, personal experience, and years of dialogue with instructors of wilderness programs, and other wilderness users. The goals of this model are to create a useful tool to help practitioners improve their programs and train instructors, focus additional research, help…

The Wilderness Vision Quest is an outdoor retreat which helps participants touch, explore, and develop important latent human resources such as imagination, intuition, creativity, inspiration, and insight. Through the careful and focused use of techniques such as deep relaxation, reflective writing, visualization, guided imagery, symbolic drawing,…

A total of 100 third and ninth grade students participated in a study to determine how children of different ages perceptually segment a continuing behavior sequence presented on a television program. The children were shown a short segment from a motion picture on a videotape viewer. Following the viewing, the children completed unitizing…

Personnel decisions in complex organizations must be made with no final guide other than one's own subjective pattern of person perceptions. From a series of studies an attempt is made to extricate from school principals the perceptual structures that appear to have guided their personnel decisions. The characteristics that they attribute to…

Using open-ended questions to elicit responses from 77 kindergarteners, 24 second graders, and 25 fifth graders in New York, an attempt was made to determine how children perceive the accuracy and the reality of television programs. The kindergarteners and second graders tended to restrict their observations to specific visual traits, while the…

When handled well, description can give poetry and prose a quality of immediacy and accessibility by creating a dramatic context in which the writer's ideas and feelings can be shared by the reader. The use of perception stimulation can aid the student in producing effective images that lead to this dramatic context. To begin this learning…