Findings of four investigations involving five through seven year olds suggest that, even though children can make relatively accurate judgments of their knowledge states, they tend to overestimate their competence when assessing their knowledge in relation to performance on a task. (RH)

Describes electronic clustering, an evaluation strategy that graphically reveals students' higher level thinking skills. (MG)

The derivation of the variance of similarity judgments is made from the 3-D process in nonlinear psychophysics. The idea of separability of dimensions in metric space theories of similarity is replaced by one parameter that represents the degree of a form of interdimensional cross-sampling. (SLD)

Describes the nineteenth-century parlor trick entitled the Fluttering Heart phenomenon which uses a red heart on a bright blue background. Discusses theories concerning the apparent fluttering. Suggests doing the trick with a red light-emitting diode in a darkened room. (MVL)

Groups of young, middle-aged, and older adults (60 each) were randomly assigned to a keyword illustration, keyword imagery, or control treatment. Illustration facilitated recall for all, imagery only for young and middle-aged adults. Illustration had a significant effect for older adults only when verbal ability was considered. (SK)

Three experiments examined 4- and 6-month-olds' sensitivity to the unity of a partly occluded moving rod undergoing translation, rotation, or oscillation. Findings suggested that all types of common motion were not equivalent for specifying infants' perceptions of occluded objects. (Author)

A study investigated whether 26 adolescents and young adults with Down syndrome experienced more difficulty in finding words to name familiar objects and sounds than 26 subjects with mental retardation due to other causes. Results found no evidence of syndrome-specific word-finding difficulty in accuracy or speed. (Author/CR)

Compares musicians' responses while listening to the first movement of Haydn's Symphony No. 104 using a two-dimensional continuous response digital interface that measured arousal (relaxing-exciting) and affect (ugly-beautiful). Indicates that there is an inverse relationship between the two dimensions. Makes comparisons to research that has…

Three experiments used a visual fixation technique to examine whether toddlers interpret speech continuously. Found that 24-month-olds had delayed responses when a competing distractor picture's label overlapped phonetically with the target at onset, but not when the pictures' labels rhymed, showing that children monitored speech stream…

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that individual differences in look-duration during infancy covary with different modes of visual intake and encoding, with longer look-durations reflecting encoding based on prolonged inspection of local visual properties, and briefer durations reflecting encoding based on a global, or global-to-local…

The performance of eight adults with Asperger syndrome was compared with the performance of controls on a range of perceptual tasks designed to test two models of perceptual deficit: the central coherence deficit model and the hierarchization deficit model. Tentative support for the hierarchization deficit model was demonstrated. (Contains ten…

The efficacy of teaching a 6-year-old with autism to make successful transitions in daily routines in three different school settings through the use of a photographic cue package was examined. Results indicated that providing advance notice of an activity change using combined verbal and photographic cues helped reduce the child's tantrums while…

Three experiments examined the ability of 4- and 5-year- olds and adults to identify correspondences in spatial ratios. Results suggested that young children made accurate spatial proportionality judgments based on relational information and not on the exact form of the stimuli. Findings pose implications for theories of mathematical development…

Traced developmental changes in automatic and intentional processing of Arabic numerals using numerical-Stroop paradigm in two studies. In numerical comparison task, found that congruent physical sizes facilitated and incongruent sizes interfered with numerical comparison at all ages relative to neutral control. In physical comparison task, found…

Investigated the influence of morphologically complex and simple words on the production of morphologically complex and simple picture names in five picture-word interference studies. Two variants of picture-word interference were employed to separate morphological from semantic and phonological effects. (Author/VWL)