Metaphors of similarity and proportionality, together with a pictorial form of similarity metaphors, proverbs, and several Piaget-type cognitive tasks, were given to 50 boys aged 5 through 13 years. Results indicated that metaphor comprehension is a type of classificatory behavior, the development of which is related to maturing cognitive…

An experiment is reported which shows that with identical preceding context, the same initial phoneme targets contained in high transitional probability words were responded to significantly faster than those in low transitional probability words. The result argues for the importance of transitional probability as an independent variable in…

Reports two experiments which examined developmental changes in the patterns of preference for varying degrees of perspective while controlling for the station point used in viewing. Subjects were 28 preschool children (age four years), 23 elementary school students (age six years) and 30 college students from introductory psychology classes. (MP)

A computer/tape recorder interface was designed, which permits automatic oral adminstration of "true-false" or "multiple-choice" type tests. This paper describes the hardware and control program software, which were developed to implement the method on a DEC PDP 11 computer. (Author/JKS)

An experiment tests conjectures that right ear advantage (REA) has an auditory origin in competition or interference between acoustically similar stimuli and that feature-sharing effect (FSE) has its origin in assignment of features of phonetically similar stimuli. No effect on the REA for acoustic similarity, and a clear effect of acoustic…

Although painting is still recognized as an international language, few people are actually capable of "reading" the great works of art that have given depth to mankind's existence. Here is a lesson in "reading a painting". (Author/RK)

Four TV film versions of the same story were shown to fifth graders; the presentation format of each film varied. Different patterns resulted between initial mental skills and knowledge acquired from each format, depending upon whether the format called upon or supplanted the skill. (Author/GDC)

Eight, ten, and twelve year old children were tested on a novel procedure involving the successive presentation of standard and comparision stimuli. Two hypotheses were evaluated: one dealing with memory effects, and the other with children's pretesting of choice responses in spatial information processing. (Editor/RK)

Jones (1976) has shown that the memory trace resulting from the viewing of a picture corresponds to a "fragment" of that picture. This research shows that the fragmentation hypothesis also correctly represents the recall of memories derived from sentences, i.e., the functional unit of memory, the mnemonic trace, is a fragment of the original item.…

Examined the development of stable concepts of "boy" and "girl" in kindergarteners and first and second graders. Gender constance was explored in relation to: performance on conservation tasks; application of gender label to self or other; application of gender label to live person or pictorial representations; and sex role…

Self-referred and court-referred clients were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups, aversive counterconditioning, behavioral self-control training or a controlled drinking composite. All therapies were conducted by trained paraprofessionals and consisted of 10 weekly sessions. No significant differences among treatments were found.…

A visual search task was used to assess developmental changes in elementary school children's selective attention to specified portions of a visual display. (Author/SB)

Proposes explanations and further research considerations for the apparent psychological equivalence of the terms "complexity" and "novelty" as they refer to information theory, stimulus generalization, and subject expectancy effects. (RL)

This research examines how pictures differ from sentences on important memory dimensions, with specific reference to Bransford and Franks (1971). (Author/RK)

This research assesses whether the presence of noise elements in a visual display affects the detection of target letters at the perceptual or feature extraction level of information processing and whether (a) input or processing channels operate in an independent or interactive fashion and (b) how the spatial relation between signal and noise…