Previous studies of the effect of age and modality on digit span task performance have yielded inconsistent results. To eliminate some of the methodological difficulties in prior research, 18 college students and 18 older adults were given the digit span task by means of three different modalities: (1) visual successive; (2) visual simultaneous;…

This study was designed to investigate whether age differences in timesharing performance would be found if the baseline performance of younger and older children was experimentally equated. Two groups of twelve 8-year-olds and one group of twelve 13-year-olds participated. Each subject performed a compensatory tracking task and an auditory…

Investigates extent to which perceptual factors of speed and flexibility of closure represent more general processes also operating in cognitive and personality domains by including in a single factor analysis perceptual tests and new tests requiring cognitive abilities resembling closure abilities operating in the perceptual domain. (RC)

Clarifies issues involved in use of heart rate as index of newborn attentional responsivity by reviewing related studies and concluding that heart rate variability can be used in studying attentional responsivity state, and intra-individual and individual variables. (ED)

This experiment (involving kindergarteners and fourth graders) examined the development of the ability to encode, store, and retrieve verbally-or visually-presented material when the modality of the test stimulus was varied. (JMB)

AN EXPERIMENT TO DETERMINE EFFECTIVENESS OF VISUAL (VI) AND VERBAL (VE) PROGRAMED PRESENTATIONS ALSO VARIED RESPONSE MODE (ACTIVE VERSUS PASSIVE) AND ORDER OF PRESENTATION OF VI AND VE VERSIONS OF A SCIENCE LESSON FOR 200 GRADE 8 STUDENTS, TAUGHT VIA CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION, THE FACTORIAL DESIGN REQUIRED EXPOSURE TO ONE LESSON VERSION, IMMEDIATE…

Examined were the effects of number of stimuli and of two different stimulus modalities on the discrimination learning of 17 autistic children (mean age 57 months). Discrimination training was carried out in three groups with varied light and sound stimuli. Among findings was that mental age was negatively correlated with trials to criterion and…

The auditory/verbal short-term memory of 64 college students was examined across a wide range of retention intervals (5 seconds to 60 seconds). High attention during interpolated processing was ensured by monitoring rehearsal with a combination of methods, and errors were analyzed for evidence of proactive and intra-unit interference. Recall of…

TO DETERMINE THE COMPARATIVE AMOUNT OF LEARNING THAT OCCURRED AND THE AUDIENCE REACTION TO MEETING EFFECTIVENESS, A 20-MINUTE INFORMATIVE SPEECH, "THE WEATHER," WAS PRESENTED WITH VISUAL AIDS TO 23 AND WITHOUT VISUAL AIDS TO 23 INFORMAL, VOLUNTARY, ADULT AUDIENCES. THE AUDIENCES WERE RANDOMLY DIVIDED, AND CONTROLS WERE USED TO ASSURE IDENTICAL…

In order to determine if infants possessed contingency awareness and if it were related to a temporal unit, two hypotheses were constructed. (1) Reinforcement of a response would probably lead to emission of that response only if the infant's next response occurred within a period of time during which he could remember the preceding…

This paper reports a study which investigated 2-month-old infants' auditory discrimination of tone quality in the male voice, extending a previous study which found that voice quality changes (soft versus harsh) in a female voice were discriminable by infants at this age. Subjects were 20 infants, tested at 8 and 9 weeks of age. Each infant was…

This study was conducted to determine whether the recent semantic-physical processing distinction that Jenkins and his associates have invoked to account for differences in subjects' recall and clustering of verbal materials could be extended to include pictorial materials as well. In the first experiment, second-grade children were exposed to 15…

An experiment was conducted on 13 normal and 13 retarded readers, matched for age, IQ, and vocabulary. Recent findings suggested that reading retardates had difficulty in the cross-modal transfer of information from the auditory to the visual modality (e.g., converting auditory taps into visual dot patterns). Prior research by the present authors…