Children aged 6 to 13 years were given verbal and nonverbal fluency tasks and block design subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Results, providing normative data, showed that fluency tasks are age-, but not sex-dependent, and are modestly correlated to one another. (Author/CM)

Two experiments were conducted to assess whether the distribution of fixation times might be related to the prevailing cognitive activity involved with two different tasks, i.e., driving and observing colored fields. The results suggest that the distribution of fixation times can be associated with the prevailing cognitive activity while viewing.…

Studied the relationship between depression and humor in 85 college students who took the Beck Depression Inventory and then rated 10 cartoons. Results showed no difference between mildly depressed and nondepressed subjects. However, some trends were noted on a mood scale related to immediate feelings and humor preference. (Author/JAC)

The effect of educational television background music on selective exposure and information acquisition was studied. Background music of slow tempo, regardless of its appeal, had negligible effects on attention and information acquisition. Rhythmic, fast-tempo background music, especially when appealing, significantly reduced visual attention to…

The functions of spaces between words in adult reading of text were investigated in three experiments. Results were consistent with a two-process theory in which filling parafoveal spaces disrupts guidance of the next eye movement and filling foveal spaces disrupts processing of the fixated word as well. (Author/RD)

Studied the ability of 9-, 12-, and 14-year-old dyslexics to recall auditorily presented letter strings. The children showed a normal phonemic confusibility effect, although overall their recall was much poorer than chronological age controls; their recall levels were similar to those of their reading age controls. (Author)

Children 3 to 6 years of age learned simple Spanish vocabulary items using an adaptation of the keyword method of foreign language vocabulary learning. Children who used the keyword method remembered more vocabulary translations than children who were not instructed in keyword method usage. (Author/RD)

Compared intellectually gifted children and controls on their ability to name and classify words and pictures of high or low frequency. High IQ children had shorter response latencies than other children and also showed no word frequency effects in the word naming tasks. (Author)

Acquisition of style recognition was studied in a category abstraction paradigm. Subjects classified impressionist paintings, according to artist, and were tested for immediate or delayed transfer. Experience with examples of a style yielded greater classification accuracy for new examples. Conceptual structure was correlated with transfer…

A technique is introduced to study the flow of information through processing stages in choice reaction time tasks. It was designed to determine whether response preparation can begin before stimulus identification is complete ("continuous" models) or if a stimulus must be fully identified prior to any response activation…

Results of two studies using the Esper paradigm to determine development of rule application and discovery are reported. Subjects learned and generalized when rule and structure were provided, but there was little evidence of rule discovery. Manipulations of memory and attention facilitated learning, but only attention facilitated rule discovery.…

Examined two hypotheses that might account for episodic-recall differences in preschool children: (1) young children's differential tendencies to attend to and interact with presented stimuli account for verbal free-recall differences, and (2) improvements in episodic-recall memory are knowledge-dependent among preschool children. (Author/DB)

The effects of a networking learning strategy upon facilitating the learning of field-dependent students are investigated. Results indicate that the strategy improves learning behavior of the field dependents on list learning and spatial learning. Learning behavior of field independents and field dependents is also compared. (Author/AEF)

To study improvement of visual monitoring of retardates, specialized training methods backed up by incentives were used. The extent to which these training techniques might be expected to produce results which would generalize was explored. Subjects were eight female mental retardates (ages 15-22) with IQs from 38 to 69. (Author/SJL)

Argues that mental images have functional properties similar to those of audiovisual media in that they can be intentionally and systematically used as the informational base for cognitive operations and as an aid to new learning. Experimental evidence is cited to support the claims. Nineteen references are cited. (Author/CHC)