Two experiments investigated the ability of 10 children with congenital blindness, 16 with residual vision, and 33 sighted children to estimate distances from a tactile map. Results found the children with visual impairments performed less well than sighted children; however, after training in how to calculate distances they improved. (Author/CR)

A study examined the effectiveness of the Power Card Strategy in teaching sportsmanship skills to a 10-year-old girl with autism. The strategy incorporates special interests to teach and reinforce academic, behavior, and social skills. The strategy was effective in teaching sportsmanship skills and the behavioral generalized across multiple…

Using their own photos and drawings, 16 South African women evaluated shared leadership and their contributions to community building. Visual media stimulated collaborative inquiry across ethnic, cultural, and political lines, enabling understanding of power relationships and their effect on women's development. (Contains 34 references.) (SK)

Auto-photography and photo elicitation are techniques that can help teachers articulate often subconscious beliefs about teaching. In auto-photography, participants, not researchers, take the pictures. Photo elicitation uses photographs to stimulate the interviewing process. Issues include research collaboration, mutual visual context,…

The study investigated the effectiveness of using visual cues to highlight the seams of baseballs, to improve the hitting of curveballs by five undergraduate varsity baseball team candidates. Results indicated that subjects hit a greater percentage of marked than unmarked balls. (Author/DB)

This introductory paper covers basic concepts and terminology relevant to the application of research on relational learning to mental retardation. The paper discusses conditional discrimination; conditional stimulus relations and stimulus equivalence; generalized stimulus relations; impact of mediational processes on emergent behavior; relational…

The investigation of interactions between the abilities of stimulus discrimination and simple learning and two instructional variables (discrimination difficulty and degree of overlearning) with 27 mentally retarded adolescents found an interaction between stimulus discrimination and the number of words presented at one time for learning…

Through an experiment with 30 college students, a theory was developed to describe response times and ratings of the difference of stimuli. The model was applied in ratings of the likableness of persons by 22 other college students. A theory of comparative response times and difference judgments is discussed. (SLD)

Examines the effects of competence, self-determination, excitement, and affiliativeness on intrinsic motivation. Showed that maintainers of each experiential state had higher levels of intrinsic motivation than nonmaintainers, substantiating that experiential states function as maintaining stimuli to sustain intrinsic motivation. Suggests that…

Recent developments are described in transmission of speech information to the skin of hearing-impaired individuals through artificial hearing devices. Discussed are tactual hearing instrument characteristics; transmission of speech sounds by tactual vocoders; vocabulary acquisition, sentence recognition, and discourse tracking through tactual…

Experiments using portable tactile aids in speech perception are reviewed, focusing on training studies, additive benefit studies, and device comparison studies (including the "Tactaid II,""Tactaid V,""Tacticon 1600," and "Tickle Talker"). The potential of tactual information in perception of the overall…

The article defines the component skills required to learn effectively from pictures, and reviews research on the development of those skills with developmentally disabled individuals. (Author/DB)

The self-injurious behaviors of nine subjects with developmental disabilities were observed in settings in which play materials, experimenter demands, or social attention were systematically varied. Although there was much between-subject and within-subject variability, higher levels of self-injury were consistently associated with a specific…

This regular column offers suggestions useful in the education or rehabilitation of individuals with visual impairments. The suggestions involve making instructional audiotapes that students can use at their own pace to learn math, vocabulary, capitalization, and other topics; making tactual maps; and using a special art tape to make tactile lines…

This study, involving 10 adults with dyslexia and 11 controls, found that controls differentiated between real and false traffic signs better than subjects did and that there was a significant correlation between traffic sign recognition and driving experience for controls but not for subjects. Results are interpreted in terms of a deficit in…