Third grade pupils learned paired associates with nonsense words serving as stimuli and familiar nouns serving as responses. Half the subjects looked at concretizing pictures of the paired items and heard sentences or labels only. Sentences without pictured stimuli impaired learning, while sentences with pictures facilitated learning…

While it is often assumed that a single mechanism underlies varied experimental evidences of selectivity, Berlyne (1969) suggested that attention-like selectivity may take place in a number of quite separate neural systems. This study examined the issue of visuospatial attention by investigating covert orientation or "looking out of the corner of…

Various aspects of iconic memory have been studied in the past. Two tachistoscopic experiments were conducted to examine how legibility of a stimulus affects a subject's ability to recall brief visual presentation. The studies used letter arrays set in four different typefaces (Helvetica, Cooper Black Outline, Electronic, Old English). In the…

Studies of selective attention suggest a system which operates across modalities and on many forms of internal representation. Complex analysis, even semantic analysis, of sensory input may occur automatically, but attention controls the locus of action. When computations carried out by the brain are effortful, in the sense that elements compete…

This paper explores relationships of visual images to verbal elements, beginning with a discussion of visible language as represented by words printed on the page. The visual flexibility inherent in typography is discussed in terms of the appearance of the letters and the denotative and connotative meanings represented by type, typographical…

At some time during every fixation a decision is made to move the eyes, directing them to a new location in the stimulus array. To understand the eye movement control processes, three general hypotheses concerning the cognitive basis for deciding to move the eyes were investigated: the saccade (movement) initiation time is determined only on the…

A total of 60 infants of 7 weeks of age were tested in a habituation-dishabituation looking procedure to determine if they could discriminate between infant-directed talk (IDT) and adult-directed talk (ADT) uttered by the same speaker. One group of 12 infants was habituated to a female speaker's ADT and dishabituated to the same speaker's IDT,…

A total of 80 infants who were 7 months old were asked to discriminate happy and surprised expressions based on compound or component changes in the eyes, mouth, or entire face. Four stimuli were employed: black and white photographs of a Caucasian female modeling happy and surprised expressions, and two hybrid expressions created by transposing…

The purpose of this study was to longitudinally examine the development of anticipatory visual search and to find out the effects of preceding experiences upon the search during the second year of life. The sample consisted of 18 Japanese firstborn nonretarded children from middle-class families who were individually tested at 11, 12, 14, 16, 22,…

The study compared the performance of schizophrenic patients and normal controls in their ability to direct visual attention. The first experiment compared 12 adult schizophrenic patients with 30 control volunteers in their ability to orient attention in response to peripheral visual cues. The patients were distinguished from controls by a slower…

Examined in three studies were the influence of perceptual organization on children's memory and the relationship between operational thought and memory performance. In the first study, 72 children at 5, 7, and 9 years of age were given a series of Piagetian tasks and a memory task. Subjects were presented with 10 color-shape pairs depicted in…

Discussed are data concerning a simple visuomotor tracking task, especially the expectations and cognitive representations involved in performing such a task. The task consisted in tracking the horizontal displacement of a target spot on the screen by appropriate forearm rotations. Each subject participated in two sessions: first, at a .8 Hz…

It has been proposed that the ability of a visual noise mask to stop processing of a target stimulus under backward-masking conditions be gauged by its ability to obscure the target when both stimuli are viewed simultaneously. Authors assessed the usefulness of this proposal. (Editor/RK)

Article addressed itself to the questions of which stimuli make up a total conditioned stimulus configuration and what the role is of the period of illumination of the target. (Author/RK)

Differential fixation to novel stimuli was obtained from 4-month-old infants to test the discrepancy hypothesis, which predicts a curvilinear relationship between degree of discrepancy and attention. (ST)