This study tested the effect of varying levels of fearful information about sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and self-efficacy of condom use on attitudes toward condom use and STD prevention. College students (N=118) from an introductory psychology class were exposed to audiotaped information about several STDs. Those in the high fear…

For 15 years an ongoing research project at the University of Pittsburgh has focused on the effects of variations in visual complexity and color on the storage and retrieval of visual information by learners. Research has shown that visual materials facilitate instruction, but has not fully delineated the interactions of visual complexity and…

The paper describes the use of an operant procedure to assess the speech perception of 11 young (7 to 35 months old) hearing impaired children and 11 normally hearing subjects. Subjects were presented with a repeating background stimulus and conditioned to turn their head on presentation of a contrasting syllable. The head-turning responses were…

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that graphs convey information effectively because they can display global trends as geometric patterns that visual systems encode easily. A novel type of graph was invented in which angles/lengths of line segments joined end-to-end represented variables of rainfall and temperature of a set of months. It was…

The nature of the memory representation of two types of information in picture stories is examined: surface information, arising directly from pictures, and conceptual information, inferred from connecting pictures into a story. (CHK)

An undergraduate's problem consisted of recurrent, frightening, and uncontrollable visual sensations. The client cooperated in exercises which involved producing, maintaining, and dismissing the sensations at the verbal signals of the therapist. At both the 45- and 85-day follow-up, the client reported substantially reduced incidence of the…

Three experiments are described which support the hypothesis that in a lexical decision task, prefixed works are analyzed into their constituent morphemes before lexical access occurs. Results compare classification times of nonwords that are and are not stems, of free and bound morphemes, and of stems and control items. (CHK)

Multiple-image projection, an exciting new audiovisual technology, offers more effective learning environments today, 360-degree training simulations tomorrow. (Author)

Comparisons of television shows along genre lines suggest significant elements of aural/visual richness as well as valuable categories of comparison for future use in other comparisons. An examination of two sitcoms and two police shows produced roughly 25 years apart--"Make Room for Daddy" with "The Cosby Show" and "Naked…

The act of composition is based on perception, selection, and arrangement in time and space of what is seen. How the world is seen depends on experience, memory, sensibility, discriminative powers, sexual identity, and cultural and historical contexts. Students can learn to understand how their personality affects what they see by maintaining…

Two studies were conducted to train students to use imagery in their learning and to investigate whether such training would transfer to solving visual puzzles and verbal problems. In the first study, with 78 graduate students, 29 experimental-group subjects were given a lecture and slide presentation designed to teach about imagery. Both the…

Human infants are sensitive from birth to some intrinsic properties of objects; they are also sensitive to position. During the first weeks of life, pertinent dimensions of differentiation between objects are relative to global properties of the entire object or pattern. Position is defined by the direction of a displacement: the trajectory…

For centuries artists have explored the uses of color in their compositions. Believing that colors have innate symbolic, expressive, and aesthetic qualities, artists have been aware that these properties can be magnified or subdued by organization within a compositional space, and artists have suggested that certain positions within a framed field…