Compared 24 educable mentally retarded (EMR) adolescents, 24 chronological age (CA) matched nonretarded adolescents, and 24 mental age (MA) matched children in same-different decision task in which dyadic sequences were presented within and across visual and auditory modalities. Results supported concept of greater visual dominance by retarded and…

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)

Tachistoscopic tests to identify three-letter words and simple geometric shapes were administered to 64 Italian children, ages 7-8. Results showed no significant differences in visual perceptual threshold between the two hemifields for either test, which was interpreted as confirming a lesser and not definitely determined lateralization in…

Examines reinforcing characteristics of attachment agents such as mothers and blankets among 100 preschool-age children. The first study assesses preferences for these agents in two-choice situations, the second study examines the effectiveness of the agents as visual reinforcers, and the third study focuses on the reinforcing capacity of the…

Two visual search experiments suggest that: cerebral lateralization of cognitive functions results from differences in sensorimotor resolution capacities of the hemispheres; both hemispheres can process verbal and visuospatial information analytically and holistically; and respective hemispheric competence is a function of the level of…

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…

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)

Letter encoding is typically viewed as an automatic process that is both obligatory and interference free. In these experiments, either familiar or non-familiar primes produced significant amounts of interference even when subjects were trying to ignore the visual input. Early perceptual components of encoding are both obligatory and resource…

Five experiments investigated how completely and accurately adults remember the visual details of the common United States penny. Subjects had to draw a penny from unaided recall and select the correct representation of a penny. Performance was poor on all tasks. Implications for long-term memory models were discussed. (Author/RD)

Only 11 of 22 mildly retarded young adults successfully passed a criterion pretest involving discriminating pairs of upright same-different cones. The 11 Ss performed poorly on a second task involving a more complex transformation. Ss who failed the criterion task produced primarily egocentric responses. (Author)

Robust interference effects were found which declined with age. Manipulating discriminability of the relevant stimulus dimension resulted in large changes in sorting time, but interference effects did not vary with baseline difficulty. These results were interpreted as strongly supporting both an absolute decrement model and a developmental trend…