Examined whether emotion labels could be taught to a low-functioning, nonverbal autistic child. Introduced four emotions (happy, angry, sad, surprised) over 6 months through visual cues (photographs of known people) within an existing home-based behavioral intervention program. Using novel photographs of familiar and unfamiliar people, showed that…

Describes an exercise in which students were presented with audiovisual stimuli intended to induce varying levels of psychological arousal and automatic activation. Explains that the purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate the integral connection between psychological interpretation and reaction to stimuli and physiological response. Presents…

Highlights the social construction of scale on the Internet and how some scale relationships are represented in web-based visual images. Maintains that web sites contain story lines that can act as guides through these scale representations. Shows the need for a "visual grammar" that will enable people to understand the logic behind the Internet.…

Focuses on teaching visual-literacy skills and multimedia. Discusses using visual images with verbal text to help students remember, helping students communicate by creating visual images, and categories of visual materials. A chart illustrates use of analogical graphics as figures of speech. (AEF)

Explores sketch maps as an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand tool for assessing library skills, knowledge, and interest among individuals and groups. The underlying principles are found in research done with maps and surveys collected for environmental psychology, urban planning, and human geography. Includes nine figures of map examples and an…

Two experiments tested a neo-Piagetian model of verbal short-term memory, comparing it with the articulatory loop model. Findings indicated that the proposed model accounted for effects of M capacity, word length, and presentation modality on short-term memory. The model's fit to the data was acceptable, and parameter estimates were consistent…

To test the concept of "shape of information," 72 participants (half from an academic setting, half from the general public) examined 24 documents typically used in the academic environment. Results indicated that when document shape was evident, the document was immediately discernible to participants; when participants were required to…

Two experiments investigated whether preverbal infants distinguish between humans and mammals. Study 1 found that 7-, 9-, and 11-month-olds distinguished humans from mammals in an object-examination task. Study 2 found that 7-month-olds but not 5-month-olds showed evidence for category discrimination with the 2-dimensional color photos of toy…

Calm or crying 9- and 12-week-olds sat facing a researcher who gazed into their eyes or at their forehead and delivered either a sucrose solution or pacifier or delivered nothing. Found that combining sweet taste and eye contact was necessary and sufficient for calm 9- and 12-week-olds to form a preference for the researcher, but not for crying…

Three studies investigated the role of surface attributes in infants' identification of agents, using a habituation paradigm designed to tap infants' interpretation of grasping as goal directed (Woodward, 1998). When they viewed a bare human hand grasping objects, 7- and 12-month-old infants focused on the relation between the hand and its goal.…

The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7-23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green.…

The purpose of this experiment was to compare components of the human and rat auditory event-related potential (ERP) in a serial feature-positive discrimination task. Subjects learned to respond to an auditory target stimulus when it followed a visual feature (X [right arrow] A+), but to not respond when it was presented alone (A-). Upon solving…

American Sign Language uses the face to express vital components of grammar in addition to the more universal expressions of emotion. The study of ASL facial expressions has focused mostly on the perception and categorization of various expression types by signing and nonsigning subjects. Only a few studies of the production of ASL facial…

The aim of the present behavioural experiment was to evaluate the most lateralized among two phonological (phoneme vs. rhyme detection) and the most lateralized among two semantic ("living" vs. "edible" categorization) tasks, within the dominant hemisphere for language. The reason of addressing this question was a practical one: to evaluate the…

Background: Some previous studies have linked Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) with a bias in spatial awareness away from the left. As genetic research suggests that ADHD may be better viewed as an extreme on a continuum rather than a distinct entity, here we examined this issue in boys from the normal population. Method: From an…