Pansophism, invented by the philosopher John Amos Comenius in the mid-1600s, is a system of education for all people to be made knowledgeable about the world, able to judge its events for themselves, and able otherwise to generate and sustain the conditions of progress. In developing this system of education, Comenius combined his first treatises…

Various aspects of iconic memory have been studied in the past. Two tachistoscopic experiments were conducted to examine how legibility of a stimulus affects a subject's ability to recall brief visual presentation. The studies used letter arrays set in four different typefaces (Helvetica, Cooper Black Outline, Electronic, Old English). In the…

Studies of selective attention suggest a system which operates across modalities and on many forms of internal representation. Complex analysis, even semantic analysis, of sensory input may occur automatically, but attention controls the locus of action. When computations carried out by the brain are effortful, in the sense that elements compete…

In a study of the use and potential of incomplete pictures for enhancing recall of orally presented prose passages, 72 educable mentally retarded (EMR) students, half reading at or above a third-grade level and half below, were randomly assigned in equal numbers to one of four conditions: control, imagery, and two incomplete-picture variations. No…

At some time during every fixation a decision is made to move the eyes, directing them to a new location in the stimulus array. To understand the eye movement control processes, three general hypotheses concerning the cognitive basis for deciding to move the eyes were investigated: the saccade (movement) initiation time is determined only on the…

A forced-choice observer-based testing procedure was used to determine pure-tone hearing thresholds for 2- to 4-week-old infants. Stimuli were 500-ms tone bursts of 500, 1,000, or 4,000 Hz with 500-ms intervals between tone bursts. Stimuli were presented monaurally by means of an insert earphone. Each 15-s trial consisted of 5 tone bursts,…

A total of 80 infants who were 7 months old were asked to discriminate happy and surprised expressions based on compound or component changes in the eyes, mouth, or entire face. Four stimuli were employed: black and white photographs of a Caucasian female modeling happy and surprised expressions, and two hybrid expressions created by transposing…

The purpose of this study was to longitudinally examine the development of anticipatory visual search and to find out the effects of preceding experiences upon the search during the second year of life. The sample consisted of 18 Japanese firstborn nonretarded children from middle-class families who were individually tested at 11, 12, 14, 16, 22,…

The study compared the performance of schizophrenic patients and normal controls in their ability to direct visual attention. The first experiment compared 12 adult schizophrenic patients with 30 control volunteers in their ability to orient attention in response to peripheral visual cues. The patients were distinguished from controls by a slower…

Examined in three studies were the influence of perceptual organization on children's memory and the relationship between operational thought and memory performance. In the first study, 72 children at 5, 7, and 9 years of age were given a series of Piagetian tasks and a memory task. Subjects were presented with 10 color-shape pairs depicted in…

Discussed are data concerning a simple visuomotor tracking task, especially the expectations and cognitive representations involved in performing such a task. The task consisted in tracking the horizontal displacement of a target spot on the screen by appropriate forearm rotations. Each subject participated in two sessions: first, at a .8 Hz…

Children hear music in the background of a large variety of situations and activities. Throughout development, they acquire knowledge both about the syntactical norms of tonal music, and about the relationship between musical form and emotion. Five to six-year-old children heard a story, with a background "happy", "sad" or no…

A graphical method is proposed which allows one to visualize a real matrix and its inverse. In this scheme, various special properties of the matrix are easily recognized. Up to 5x5 matrices can be graphed on an average page if the range of values does not exceed two orders of magnitude. (Author/LS)

The present experiment was an attempt to determine whether, under different testing procedures and with different stimulus materials, an effect of poststimulus study time on picture recognition could be demonstrated. (Author)

It has been proposed that the ability of a visual noise mask to stop processing of a target stimulus under backward-masking conditions be gauged by its ability to obscure the target when both stimuli are viewed simultaneously. Authors assessed the usefulness of this proposal. (Editor/RK)