Assessed development of auditory selective attention using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures. Subjects heard tones or consonant-vowel sequences to detect deviant targets. Found that Nd difference (ERP difference between unattended and attended standard) showed effect of selective attention. For both tones and…

Studied 4- to 10-year-olds' familiarity judgments of peers. Found that, contrary to adults, external facial features were key. Also found that the switch to adult recognition pattern takes place after the ninth year. (ETB)

The perception of emotions from facial expression was studied with 68 schizotypal individuals and a control group (n=40). The results did not support the hypotheses that the schizotypal group would display more restricted similarity range in judging emotions, judge emotions as less pleasant, and display less accuracy in labelling emotions. (SW)

In three experiments, nine-month-old infants were trained to fixate on a particular feature in a pair of stimuli that varied along three dimensions. In a fourth experiment, infants were trained to fixate on a stimulus compound until reaching a learning criterion. Infants' discrimination learning under these conditions implied an ability to attend…

Two studies involving 177 undergraduates examined the effects that mental representations derived from maps and verbal descriptions have on the recall of facts from a text. Findings suggest that there may be fundamental differences between visual and verbal representations of the same space. (SLD)

In two experiments, preschool children and adults were asked to judge which way an equilateral triangle was pointing under several contextual conditions. Results indicated that children and adults attended to both global and local levels of a pattern. (BC)

A two-year study of creativity in Japanese companies concluded that human resource development policy and education/training can influence corporate creativity through promotion of information movement and selective acquisition of diverse stimuli. (Reactions to Stern's study by Torrance and Johnson are included.) (SK)

Argues that effects of emotional visuals accompanying television news broadcasts are reflected not in the exact recall of text but through specific kinds of errors in recall and the relation of these errors to certain parts of the item. (SR)

Assessed infants' ability to anticipate temporally cued events by presenting trials in which an interesting event was paired with a noise, followed by trials in which the interesting event was omitted. Infants demonstrated anticipatory heart-rate responses to the interesting event and a change in response to the interesting event from general to…

Assessed infants' detection of relative motion between a target and its surrounding static reference features in two experiments. Found evidence for 8- and 20-week-olds' detection of a moving target, and a target and surrounding reference features moving in opposite directions. Twenty-week-olds detected a target that moved faster and in the same…

Seven experiments involving a total of 203 college students explored a form of object-specific priming and established a robust object-specific benefit that indicates that a new stimulus will be named faster if it physically matches a previous stimulus seen as part of the same perceptual object. (SLD)

This study of 14 mother-infant dyads found that deaf mothers were highly responsive to infants but, unlike hearing mothers, waited to respond until infants spontaneously looked back at them. The paper proposes incorporating the strategies used by deaf mothers into an interaction model for use with hearing parents whose infants have hearing loss.…

A general theory of humor elicitation is presented that specifies the conditions in which humor is experienced in both social and nonsocial situations. The theory is used to conceptualize humor elicited by jokes, witticisms, and social events that are not intended or expected to be humorous. (SLD)

Four experiments involving 18 individuals (ages 14-55) with profound multiple handicaps found that 12 stimuli used in a preference assessment represented a comprehensive stimulus set for identifying preferences, though the utility of the set could sometimes be enhanced by caregiver opinion. Results also indicated that preferences identified were…

Examined temporal structure of free toy play by five year olds. Findings showed that the engagement of children's attention was initially fragile; became more fragile for a period of about 12 seconds into toy play episodes; and then grew stronger. (SH)