Recently, knowledge of the mechanisms of visual-spatial attention has improved due to studies employing single cell recording with alert monkeys and studies using performance analysis of neurological patients. These studies suggest that a complex neural network including parts of the posterior parietal lobe and midbrain are involved in covert…

Based on the notion that visual decisions play an important role in what children recognize and interpret in books and that teachers have a special responsibility to help students become visually literate, this article draws parallels between visual and verbal concepts and suggests some activities for teaching "picture reading" skills in the…

In order to discover reader reactions to color on a newspaper page, specifically eye movement and overall opinion of the paper, identical pages were created and printed by the "St. Petersburg Times" (Florida). The content of fifteen front pages, six lifestyles pages, and three sports front pages were nearly identical, differing only in the kind…

A study examined the expectation that videotaped male models would be rated similarly to ratings previously found in research literature for red, blue, and monotone hues, and high, medium, and low levels of color saturation. Using a Graeco-Latin Square design, the ratings of 147 subjects (communications students at the University of Utah) were…

This work investigates, first, whether the integration of color and shape information is affected by attending to the stimulus location, and second, whether attending to a stimulus location enhances the perceptual representation of the stimulus or merely affects decision processes. In three experiments, subjects were briefly presented with colored…

The processing of mental structures in perception appears to be serial, in that viewers can fill in missing parts from an impoverished stimulus following a top down process. To investigate the effects of unfamiliarity, complexity, and legibility on object and layout perception of unfamiliar stimuli, ten subjects were shown one of four ribbon…

Semantic theory, its relationship to comprehension, the nature and function of semantic memory, and results of some research on semantic memory and bilinguals are discussed through a review of recent literature. The findings discussed seem to confirm these general observations regarding semantic memory and bilinguals: (1) there is integration and…

To provide converging support that the proper integration of analog and propositional representational systems is associated with spatial ability, the visual, auditory, and bimodal brain event-related potentials were recorded from 50 right-handed Caucasian males. Sensory interaction indices were derived for these subjects who had taken the Surface…

The study, a comparison between moderately and severely mentally handicapped children, and nonhandicapped children, explored memory span over the developmental age range of 3-6 years. A batch-processing adaptation of a task involving auditory-visual matching was used. Age effects and effects of stimulus mode on recognition ability and span were…

The concept of adding pictures to text to attempt to produce significantly better recall when instructors are not available was examined in this study. Forty-seven undergraduates, selected from an original group of 90 who took the Group Embedded Figures Test, were classified as field independent or field dependent, and randomly assigned to one of…

This study explored children's play behavior as it may be influenced by a particular type of television programming, i.e., shows based on commercially available toys. Subjects were two groups of 5- to 6-year-old and 7- to 8-year-old boys who were exposed to a representative program, The Transformers, which features the Transformer toys. Exposure…

While researchers have made progress in understanding metaphor comprehension, less is known about the production of metaphoric language. College students (N=129) were asked to use metaphoric comparisons to describe 16 topics. They were told to imagine themselves on a trip, writing home to someone they knew well, either a peer or a child (students…

An internal cognitive variable--mental imagery representation--was studied using a set of three information-processing strategies under external stimulus visual display conditions for various learning levels. The copy strategy provided verbal and visual dual-coding and required formation of a vivid mental image. The relational strategy combined…

The significance of spatial factors on an initial segmentation and an active attentional phase was demonstrated by briefly exposing spatial configurations of elements, and then asking the subjects to reproduce the patterns or to search them for a target letter. The stimulus displays consisted of small o's forming different spatial configurations,…

Levels of independent variable(s) are often mixed within each block of trials rather than each level being presented in a separate block in research of various types. Two experiments involving tasks of a visual nature were conducted to demonstrate that such mixing can easily obscure the effects of principal interest. A target circle was projected…