Two studies examined 9- to 15-month-olds' ability to deduce an abstract nonmatching rule from reward feedback. Results showed that physical connectedness between stimuli and reward was key to performance. In the absence of the perception that stimulus and reward were components of a single thing, even close spatial and temporal proximity were…

Advances the idea that storyboarding, long associated with scriptwriting, advertising, and more recently with technical manuals, can be successfully applied to an even broader variety of technical documents. Applies storyboarding techniques to designing technical proposals to suggest methods of incorporating more visuals into documents, as well as…

Reports an experiment contrasting word-onset gating with results when words were gated from their word endings. The study demonstrated a significant recognition advantage for words gated from their onsets. The overall results support the position that the perceptual advantage of word-initial information can be understood within a general…

Argues that Abbott's reservations arise largely from assuming that the term "hearer-new" must be restricted to its original use as defined in Prince (1992). Also argues that if "hearer-new" may be extended to encompass a wider range of "entities" (including events, attributes, etc.) and greater flexibility in its potential applications, then many…

A study of seven adults with mild mental retardation investigated whether nonverbal behavior was under the control of covert rules and whether verbal reports of these rules were functionally equivalent to the covert rules that control nonverbal behavior. Results indicated self-instructions, when used as external instructions, produced the desired…

Two experiments investigated the ability of 10 children with congenital blindness, 16 with residual vision, and 33 sighted children to estimate distances from a tactile map. Results found the children with visual impairments performed less well than sighted children; however, after training in how to calculate distances they improved. (Author/CR)

A study examined the effectiveness of the Power Card Strategy in teaching sportsmanship skills to a 10-year-old girl with autism. The strategy incorporates special interests to teach and reinforce academic, behavior, and social skills. The strategy was effective in teaching sportsmanship skills and the behavioral generalized across multiple…

Using their own photos and drawings, 16 South African women evaluated shared leadership and their contributions to community building. Visual media stimulated collaborative inquiry across ethnic, cultural, and political lines, enabling understanding of power relationships and their effect on women's development. (Contains 34 references.) (SK)

Auto-photography and photo elicitation are techniques that can help teachers articulate often subconscious beliefs about teaching. In auto-photography, participants, not researchers, take the pictures. Photo elicitation uses photographs to stimulate the interviewing process. Issues include research collaboration, mutual visual context,…

The study investigated the effectiveness of using visual cues to highlight the seams of baseballs, to improve the hitting of curveballs by five undergraduate varsity baseball team candidates. Results indicated that subjects hit a greater percentage of marked than unmarked balls. (Author/DB)

This introductory paper covers basic concepts and terminology relevant to the application of research on relational learning to mental retardation. The paper discusses conditional discrimination; conditional stimulus relations and stimulus equivalence; generalized stimulus relations; impact of mediational processes on emergent behavior; relational…

The investigation of interactions between the abilities of stimulus discrimination and simple learning and two instructional variables (discrimination difficulty and degree of overlearning) with 27 mentally retarded adolescents found an interaction between stimulus discrimination and the number of words presented at one time for learning…

Through an experiment with 30 college students, a theory was developed to describe response times and ratings of the difference of stimuli. The model was applied in ratings of the likableness of persons by 22 other college students. A theory of comparative response times and difference judgments is discussed. (SLD)

Examines the effects of competence, self-determination, excitement, and affiliativeness on intrinsic motivation. Showed that maintainers of each experiential state had higher levels of intrinsic motivation than nonmaintainers, substantiating that experiential states function as maintaining stimuli to sustain intrinsic motivation. Suggests that…

Recent developments are described in transmission of speech information to the skin of hearing-impaired individuals through artificial hearing devices. Discussed are tactual hearing instrument characteristics; transmission of speech sounds by tactual vocoders; vocabulary acquisition, sentence recognition, and discourse tracking through tactual…