Discusses indexing and retrieval for effective searches of digitized images. Reports on an empirical study about criteria for analysis and indexing digitized images, and the different types of user queries done in newspaper image archives in Denmark. Concludes that it is necessary that the indexing represent both a factual and an expressional…

This study found that violent or horrible images in news stories increased attention, amount of capacity required to process a message, and ability to retrieve a story; facilitated recognition of information presented during a video; inhibited recognition for information presented before; and indicated that negative images increased the…

Two experiments studied the impact of the nature of information available at different processing levels on differences in haptic (tactile) and in visual, free classification development. Found that exploration characteristics (involving simultaneous versus independent processing of stimulus dimensions) and presentation of the stimulus dimensions…

Three studies used computer graphics and/or verbal questioning to examine beliefs among children and adults that vision involves input to the eyes (intromission) or emissions from the eye (extramission). Results showed decreases in extramission and increases in intromission beliefs across age. There were more extramission interpretations with…

Reviews the eye-movement paradigm and refers to recent experiments applying the paradigm to issues of spoken word recognition (e.g., lexical competitor effects), syntactic processing, reference resolution, focus, as well as issues in cross-modality integration that are central to evaluating the modularity hypothesis. (Seven references) (Author/CK)

Examined effects of a click signaling arrival of a visual stimulus to be timed on temporal discrimination in 3-, 5-, and 8-year-olds. Found that in all groups, the proportion of long responses increased with the stimulus duration, although the steepness of functions increased with age. Stimulus duration was judged longer with than without the…

Two studies examined whether infants' category discrimination in an object-examination task was based solely on an ad hoc analysis of perceptual similarities among the experimental stimuli. Findings indicated that 10- to 11-month- olds' responses varied systematically only with the presence of a category change, but not with the degree of…

A study assessed whether a program involving simple hand-movement responses combined with optic microswitches and followed by preferred stimuli would be successful with two persons with multiple disabilities (ages 11 and 30). Data showed participants reached fairly high levels of responding during intervention and retained their achievement…

This study assessed cognitive processing speed among full-term and preterm infants when they reached 5, 7, and 12 months of age. Findings indicated that at all ages, preterms required about 20 percent more trials and 30 percent more time than full-terms to reach criterion on a novelty preference task. Among preterms, slower processing was…

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that the importance of linguistic labels for young children's conceptual organization stems from a privileged processing status of auditory input over visual input. Findings indicated that when auditory and visual stimuli were presented separately, 4-year-olds were likely to process both kinds of stimuli,…

In this study, non-French participants learned gender-appropriate adjectives for 24 French nouns. Findings indicate that learning the same set of feminine French nouns could be made more or less difficult when the nouns in the masculine category created more or less competition. (45 references) (Author/CK)

A study examined three different visual formats (studio presenter only, realistic visuals, or schematic visuals) of an educational television program. Recognition and recall of the abstract subject matter were measured in 101 adult viewers directly after the program and 3 months later. The schematic version yielded better recall of the program,…

The behavioral and heart rate responses of 22 children (ages 3-4) with autism and 22 with other developmental disabilities were compared while they were watching videotapes of a baby either playing or crying. Both groups of children showed heart rate slowing when watching the video of the crying baby. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Three experiments investigated 2- to 6-month-olds' perception of the continuity of an object trajectory that was briefly occluded. Results across experiments provided little evidence of veridical responses to trajectory occlusion in the youngest infants, but by 6 months, perception completion was more robust. Results suggest that perceptual…

Three studies explored whether children's tendency to extend object names on the basis of sameness of shape (shape bias) is specific to naming. Findings indicated that 2- and 3-year-olds showed shape bias both when asked to extend a novel name and when asked to select an object of the same kind as a target object; 3-year-olds also showed shape…