Discusses two problems in the study by Blass and Ciaramitaro reported in this monograph: (1) whether the measurement of behavior states as "on-off" or "graded" captures a behavioral process or reflects the measurement itself; (2) whether the term "state" explains findings as a single function that may be better…

To assess changes in processing speed in the second and third years of life, 2 sequential visual events were shown to 22-, 27-, and 32-month-old children, 12 at each age. Response clusters indicated that speed of processing increased with age and that a proactive inhibition declined with age. (SLD)

In a visual habituation experiment, infants watched a circle (the "agent") move toward another circle by jumping over a barrier or jumping without a barrier present, and then watched a circle move straight to another circle. Found that infants were able to identify the agent's spatial goal and to interpret the agent's actions causally in…

The memory abilities of adults (N=20) with Down Syndrome (DS) were compared to subjects matched on age and IQ and on age alone. Three memory tasks were employed: facial recognition, free recall of pictures and words, and cued recall of separate or interacting pictures. In DS individuals, memory was improved primarily by practice and interactive…

A series of experiments involving over 400 college students performing acoustic-lexical decisions during object naming at different stimulus-onset asynchronies show semantic activation of lexical candidates and phonological activation of target items but no phonological activation of other semantically activated items, supporting a two-stage view…

Tested the recognition memory of 4-, 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants using visual paired comparison tasks. Found that at even the youngest age that reaching was tested (6 months), infants showed evidence of recognition memory on the reaching task at delays at least as long as those at which they demonstrated recognition memory on the looking…

In later life, I. P. Pavlov incorporated his findings on aging into his theory of higher nervous activity. Some of the major findings showed that salivary conditioning and stimulus differentiation were difficult to establish in old dogs, but that conditioned reflexes established earlier in life persisted into old age. Pavlov hypothesized that…

Four experiments tested four month olds on visual discrimination tasks. As the time allotted to solve these problems was shortened, infants who looked at stimuli for a short amount of time performed better than other infants, indicating that performance superiority was attributable to speed of processing. (BC)

Three boys (ages 9-13) with academic deficits learned delayed matching-to-sample tasks that used complex sample stimuli, consisting of a picture and printed word. The procedure engendered new constructed-response spelling performances and arbitrary relations among pictures and printed words in matching to sample. (Author/JDD)

Study used two experiments to examine the development of children's comprehension of the use of intonation and belief verbs to mark the relative certainty with which a speaker makes a statement. It is argued that children's understanding of prosody will be best revealed in contexts in which they are required to respond to the pragmatic function of…

Two studies examined four- and five-month-old infants' behaviors of leaning forward toward, and reaching for, an object placed within or beyond their reach. Infants who did not lean forward showed a decline in reaching behavior when the object was placed beyond their reach. (MDM)

Assessed 13- and 20-week-olds infants' discrimination between shearing stimuli, in which columns of dots move vertically on a screen at different velocities, and foil stimuli, in which all dots move at the same velocity. Results revealed the threshold levels of dot velocity in shearing stimuli at which discrimination occurred. (BC)

Investigated the hypothesis that preschoolers encode perceptual attributes, but not conceptual attributes, of objects in recall tasks. Children were asked to recall typical and atypical objects, or objects that varied in typicality and size. Children were influenced by both conceptual and perceptual stimulus characteristics. (LB)

A study examined how well children could discriminate matches from nonmatches of multicomponent stimuli within the prototypic mental rotation task and how long it would take them to make such discriminations. The goal was to determine whether children are differentially sensitive to the various spatial features of visual stimuli and whether…

A theory of visual information acquisition and visual memory is described that conjoins two models that have been used to describe low-level perceptual and higher level cognitive processes. Six experiments with 21 adult observers generally support the theory, although some weakness is discussed. (SLD)