Assesses performance of 9-, 13-, and 20-year-olds on 3,840 trials of a mental rotation task in which subjects judged if pairs of stimuli presented in different orientations were identical or mirror images. Results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms underlying the impact of practice. (Author/NH)

Two variants of the habituation paradigm were used to investigate fine orientation discrimination and shape constancy in 34 young infants. Results demonstrate that conditions determine whether young infants show sensitivity to relatively fine variations in pattern orientation or give evidence of shape constancy with the same patterns. (HOD)

Three experiments demonstrate that children four to ten years old, when presented with a series recall task with pictures of common objects having short or long names, showed consistently better recall of pictures with short names. (HOD)

Reports on three experiments that assessed the attentional responses of 4-month-old infants to frequency-modulated sweeps corresponding to the frequency range of adult-to-infant and adult-to-adult intonational patterns. (HOD)

Synthesizes existing knowledge regarding the communication effects of animation and empirically assesses some of these effects. Results of this confirm that animation can be a viable method of advertising. (SRT)

Sixty-four learning disabled sixth, seventh, and eighth graders were assigned to 24 small instructional groups that were in turn assigned at random to mnemonic and control conditions, and instructional groups were given daily lessons. Results indicated that mnemonic groups outperformed control groups on the immediate and delayed tests. (Author/LMO)

Describes an instruction approach for teaching external clues that context clue instruction occurs over many years at all grade levels and asserts that this can used for learning vocabulary. Defines external context clues as syntactic and semantic elements within and among sentences. (SRT)

Three adolescents with moderate to severe mental retardation were taught to use picture prompts to guide their performance on two vocational sequencing tasks. All students completed the training task with at least 96% accuracy with the picture prompts, and generalized their performance with equal accuracy to the untrained task. (Author/CL)

Contrasts the dramatic potential of two media--the novel and the television production--and illustrates why great novels should not be made into television shows. (AEA)

Students in grades two, four, six, and college sorted abstract visual patterns that varied both in amount of contour and in type of visual organization (unstructured, simple symmetries, multiple symmetries, and rotational). Results suggested that children attend to both amount of contour and visual organization, but that attention to visual…

Five language-eliciting situations were presented to kindergarten and primary-grade children to identify developmental trends and task effects in the complexity of language structures, vocabulary, functions, and story conventions used. Limited developmental differences and significant task effects were found. Implications for classroom instruction…

Crossmodal transfer of stimulus control procedures was used to establish reliable responding to an auditory cue in three severely multiply handicapped students who had previously failed to demonstrate reliable responses to stimuli presented in the auditory mode. As a result, all three students were able to participate in formal audiometric…

Two experiments were performed with five severely developmentally disabled individuals (13-26 years old) to test the relationship between toys as conditioned reinforcers and stereotypy. Findings suggested that conditioning reinforcers for play, such as toys, may result in a durable and possibly more cost effective procedure of dealing with…

An experiment is conducted showing that an attention shift to a stream of numerals presented in rapid serial visual presentation mode produces not a total loss, but a systematic distortion of order. An attention gating model (AGM) is developed from a more general attention model. (Author/LMO)

Individual differences in memory were examined from the levels of processing perspective. The hypothesis that retarded persons process at a more superficial level was not supported. A "Spread of encoding" deficit in retarded persons is favored to explain the recall differences obtained in this experiment. (Author/LMO)