Investigated how different contexts for learning affect the development of memory-enhancing strategies in children. Subjects were children four to seven years old. Results indicated that the number of items recalled in the lesson condition was significantly greater than in the game condition, and the grade effect was also significant. (MOK)

The hyperbolic cosine unfolding model for direct responses (HCMDR) of persons to individual stimuli is elaborated in three ways. The specialization of the second parameter is shown to be a property of the data, and not arbitrary. The HCMDR is used to construct an elegant model for pairwise preferences. (SLD)

Compared the performance of children with and without autism in object-based positive and negative priming tasks within a visual search procedure. Found object-based positive and negative priming effects in both groups, with no group differences in the magnitude of the effects. Compared to typically developing children, children with autism were…

Demonstrates the value of a knowledge of linguistics and theories of human language to technical authors in terms of the communication model, grammar, rhetorical patterns, some linguistic features of technical English, semantics, and visual and graphic representation. (SC)

In this study, the looking behavior of 16 autistic and 14 non-autistic children toward cartoon-like scenes that included a human figure was measured quantitatively using an infrared eye-tracking device. Fixation behavior of autistic children was similar to that of their age-and IQ-matched normal peers. Results do not support the idea that autistic…

Notes the difference between "properly" stimulated and "expensively stimulated" or "over" stimulated when it comes to providing an environment for infant brain development. Highlights the effectiveness of just talking to a child. Suggests that more important than a particular toy is that parents be attuned to the kind…

Suggests that pictures offer equality of access to texts for all children, and provide an effective medium for promoting discussion and reflection. Finds that children are able to develop skills of metacognition through talking about a pictorial text--children as young as six are able to demonstrate their understandings of the reading process. (RS)

Two experiments are reported in which the ratio of the average times spent in the terminal and initial links ("Tt/Ti") in concurrent chains was varied. In Experiment 1, pigeons responded in a three-component procedure in which terminal-link variable-interval schedules were in constant ratio, but their average duration increased across components…

Infants aged 3-5 months (mean of approximately 4 months) were given a novel anticipatory looking task to test object permanence understanding. They were trained to expect an experimenter to retrieve an object from behind a transparent screen upon hearing a cue (''Doors up, here comes the hand''). The experimenter then hid the object behind one of…

In four experiments the behavioral consequences of an involuntary attentional distraction concerning memory performance was investigated. The working memory model of Cowan (1995) predicts a performance deficit for memory representations that are held in an active state when the focus of attention is distracted by a change in physical properties.…

Humans are fast and accurate at performing an animal categorization task with natural photographs briefly flashed centrally. Here, this central categorization task is compared to a three position task in which photographs could appear randomly either centrally, or at 3.6 [degrees] eccentricity (right or left) of the fixation point. A mild…

In this study, we investigated whether the left and right hemispheres are differentially involved in causal inference generation. Participants read short inference-promoting texts that described either familiar or less-familiar scenarios. After each text, they performed a lexical decision on a letter string (which sometimes constituted an…

Objective: To assess baseline and modulated acoustic startle responses in adolescent girls with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Method: Twenty-eight adolescent girls with PTSD and 23 healthy control girls were recruited for participation in the study. Acoustic stimuli were bursts of white noise of 104 dB presented biaurally through…

This study examined the process of communication within the professional-family relationship by identifying and describing the types and patterns of talk during interactions between 15 families of young children with developmental delays and their respective early interventionists. Videotaped interactions of routine home visits were coded using a…

Four visual imagery tasks were presented to three groups of adolescents with or without spastic diplegic cerebral palsy. The first group was composed of six adolescents with cerebral palsy who had associated visual-perceptual deficits (CP-PD), the second group was composed of five adolescents with cerebral palsy and no associated visual-perceptual…