Sixteen moderately mentally retarded children, aged 9-13, were trained in sight words by manipulating pictorial stimuli (fading versus nonfading) in relationship to the word stimulus location (superimposition versus juxtaposition of picture and word), to orient the learner's attention to the word. Subjects who were trained using superimposition…

Investigates the additive memory effect of two modes of presenting information to elementary children on the retention of both images and words. Children represented more information in pictorial than in verbal form. The visual-verbal treatment group scored higher on most of both verbal and pictorial responses than the visual treatment group.…

Two experiments studied whether altering an auditory stimulus' rate of change affected infants' fixation of changing visual stimuli. Results demonstrated that infants exposed simultaneously to auditory and visual stimulation showed a reduced tendency to fixate on relatively more visually stimulating events. Heart rates also accelerated during…

Examined the discriminant validity of sexual responses to stories of child sexual assault when told from the point of view of a male perpetrator versus that of a female child victim. Results indicate the relevance of changing deviant preferences and enhancing empathy for the victim while treating child molesters. (RJM)

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 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…

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.)…

The task was to survey an area of a planet's surface to identify the presence of various geological features such as a trench, ridge, or basin. Students who received prior pictorial representations of features performed more accurately than students who did not, but there was no significant effect for including verbal statements about strategies…

Objective: Cognitive effects of stimulant medication were investigated in children with mental retardation (MR) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Method: Performance on tasks tapping sustained attention, visual and auditory selective attention, inhibition, and immediate memory was assessed for 24 children (mean age 10.9 years)…

In this article, the author discusses two strategies--visual cues (modeling) and verbal cues (short, accurate phrases) which are related to teaching motor skills in maximizing learning in physical education classes. Both visual and verbal cues are strong influences in facilitating and promoting day-to-day learning. Both strategies reinforce…

The McGurk effect is usually presented as an example of fast, automatic, multisensory integration. We report a series of experiments designed to directly assess these claims. We used a syllabic version of the "speeded classification" paradigm, whereby response latencies to the first (target) syllable of spoken word-like stimuli are slowed down…

This article presents and tests the authors' integration hypothesis of global/local processing, which proposes that at early stages of processing, the identities of global and local units of a hierarchical stimulus are represented separately from information about their respective levels and that, therefore, identity and level information have to…

This paper compares the production and perception of the rise-fall contour of contrastive statements and the final rise-fall part of polar questions in Greek. The results show that these superficially similar rise-falls exhibit fine phonetic differences in the alignment of tonal targets with the segmental string, and that these differences can be…

In a permanently changing environment, it is by no means an easy task to distinguish potentially important events from negligible ones. Yet, to survive, every animal has to continuously face that challenge. How does the brain accomplish this feat? Building on previous work in "Drosophila melanogaster" visual learning, we have developed an…

In the present work, we developed a database of nonlinguistic sounds that mirror prosodic characteristics typical of language and thus carry affective information, but do not convey linguistic information. In a dichotic-listening task, we used these novel stimuli as a means of disambiguating the relative contributions of linguistic and affective…