Progressively delayed extra-stimulus prompts were used to help kindergarten children discriminate left-right mirror-image stimuli in four experiments. Results showed that most subjects rapidly learned to respond to the orientation prompts; delayed orientation prompting was always successful regardless of how the prompts were eliminated; and the…

Infants were habituated to reversible and nonreversible pictures of faces. The reversible picture depicted a different face when inverted 180 degrees. For the reversible picture, the infants devoted more visual attention to the inverted picture than to the original picture. (BC)

Adults and 6 and 10 year olds performed tasks in which they combined and subtracted parts of visual images to discover new images. Results indicated that adults and children were able to transform a mental image so as to yield another image. (BC)

Infants were familiarized haptically to an object and then presented with stimuli that were identical to or different in shape or texture from the first object. Infants demonstrated recognition of shape and texture when the stimuli were presented without delay; of shape when presented after a five-minute delay; and of texture when presented after…

Cyclical fluctuation in spontaneous motor activity (CM) emerges in fetus and persists in newborn. This "resetting" experiment perturbed CM by noise stimulus during infants' active sleep. Pre- and postperturbation CM were measured and compared. Subjects were 33 infants between 1 and 3 days of age. The stimulus induced a relative slowing of CM…

Examines infants' ability to detect correlations among feature categories of the type that one might expect to be useful in forming natural object categories. (PCB)

Shows how visual images and text differ from one another in the extent to which they resemble their referents; kinds of concepts they evoke; precision with which they evoke them; kinds of structures they impose on the information they convey; and degree to which that information can be interpreted by perceptual as opposed to higher level cognitive…

Presents examples of logotypes of the word "Mexico" by second-semester typography students from the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico. Analyzes each according to its unity, coherence, and emphasis. Discusses the context, syntactic and semantic rhetorical figures, metaphor, and the denotation and connotation of each. (CR)

Proposes a parallel distributed-processing (PDP) model to account for choice-reaction-time performance in diverse cognitive and perceptual tasks that are interrelated in terms of stimulus-stimulus and stimulus-response overlap. Simulation results support the PDP model. (SLD)

A multidimensional scaling procedure is introduced that attempts to derive a spatial representation of stimuli unconfounded by the effect of subjects' degrees of familiarity with these stimuli. A Monte Carlo study investigating the extent to which the procedure recovers known parameters shows that the procedure succeeds in adjusting for…

This discussion shows that a dynamic model for stimulus generalization based on an elementary diffusion process can reproduce the qualitative properties of spatial orientation in animals, including behavior in mazes. The model provides a behavioristic "reader" for the cognitive maps proposed by E. Tolman (1932). (SLD)

Sixteen adolescents with mental retardation and 16 typical adolescents participated in a negative priming procedure in two experiments. Unlike previous studies, this study found that subjects exhibited inhibition under instructions to respond on the basis of stimulus identity in a manner similar to that of individuals without mental retardation.…

This study investigated novel word acquisition by 18- and 24-month-old children in the context of adult referential behavior independent of variations in salience. Findings suggest that 24-month olds use referential intent of the speaker to learn new words, but when learning, they may have a less secure grasp on the meaning of speakers'…

We examined the effect of stimulus complexity and frequency on infants' attention responses during an auditory habituation procedure. Five stimuli of different complexity and frequency were presented repeatedly to 80 5-month-old infants. Quicker attention-getting and longer attention-holding responses were obtained with the more complex stimuli.…

We present three experiments in which subjects were asked to make speeded sex judgements (Experiment 1) or semantic judgements (Sections 3 and 4) to face targets and nonface items, while ignoring a solitary flanking distractor face or a nonface stimulus. Distractors could be either congruent (same response category) or incongruent (different…