As follow up to a study which compared forced-choice preferential looking (FPL) with pattern visual evoked potential (VEP), this study increased the VEP success rate and improved agreement between the FPL and VEP acuity estimates by using horizontal bar stimuli for young preverbal children (n=17) with nystagmus. (Author/DB)

The visual event-related potentials and concurrently measured fixation times of 20 nonretarded autistic children (ages 5-15) were compared with those of normal children, "externalizers," and "internalizers." Autistic children had smaller P3 waves compared to normal controls. No intergroup differences were found in…

Twenty-four adults with mild mental retardation were compared with equal-mental age children and adults without mental retardation on tactile processing asymmetries. Results suggest that hemispheric processing is dependent on information processing requirements rather than type of stimulus. (Author/JDD)

A visual orienting task was given to 11 high functioning male adolescents and adults with autism. Findings suggested that autistic people have difficulty processing briefly presented cue information and problems disengaging and shifting attention within the visual modality. Results support previous ideas that attentional dysfunction may underlie…

Eye movements of 12-week-old infants were recorded in a visual encoding experiment. Results showed that infants who encoded more slowly scanned less extensively over the stimulus and engaged in prolonged fixation. An experiment with two-week olds showed significant age differences in the manner of visual scanning. (BC)

Children and adults performed a divided attention task and two selective attention tasks with shapes that were either spatially integrated or separated. Results indicate that integrated stimuli are initially perceived as wholes, and separated stimuli as features, at all ages. (BC)

Argues that information science is the interface between people and literatures. Presents recent models of literatures that offer visual cues to relationships among writings that often are based on term occurrences/co-occurrences. Deals with online and offline visualizations and gives a critique of visualization research. Contains 240 references.…

Addresses issues to consider in conducting computer presentations. Discusses presentation devices--television, multiscan capable monitor, LCD (liquid crystal display) panel with overhead projector, and video/RGB (red, green, blue) projector; lighting; audience size; and types of presentations--fast/short time multimedia presentations, oral and…

A study evaluated the effectiveness of a teaching package (graduated guidance and visual activity schedules) in teaching four children (ages 7-8) with autism to increase on-task and on-schedule behavior. Student performance rose to criterion levels upon introduction of the graduated guidance procedures and maintained when the picture activity book…

Examines evidence that the research community studying infants' object concept and the community concerned with adult object-based attention have been studying the same natural kind. Maintains that the discovery that the object representations of young infants are the same as the object files of mid-level visual cognition has implications for both…

Presents two probe recognition experiments investigating whether overt and null pronouns in American Sign Language (ASL) similarly reactivate their referents during online sentence comprehension. Both experiments indicated that an important link exists between spatial verb agreement and the ASL pronomial system and that nonreferent inhibition does…

Describes an essay activity used in freshman English-as-a-Second-Language classes to teach observation of detail. Components of the approach include the following: (1) students must learn how to observe; (2) they must begin with a realistic, clearly defined task; and (3) they must work through the process of generating and organizing ideas…

Discusses concepts of semiotics relevant to visual literacy and stresses two important points of intersection: active perception and diversity of sign systems. Argues that an educational program with a semiotic framework would change its focus from content to process, and that a visual literacy component would enhance learning across modalities,…

Describes a graphic modeling, natural language processing system, VerbalImage, which mimics features of human shape reasoning. Subjects read the same text description and were able to recognize the image generated by the computer from among a series of other computer-generated images. Performance on task was as good as for a control group…

Two high school students with severe disabilities were taught to perform job tasks using a two-step process: touching a picture to prompt initiation of a task and turning a picture in a booklet to indicate task completion. As participants acquired the picture prompt strategy, their independent task initiations increased. (Contains references.)…