The relationships between reading comprehension level, digit span, and short-term memory for Morse code-like temporal patterns were investigated. College students performed better when the first pattern was auditory. No relationship for college or fifth-grade students was found between digit span and accuracy in comparing patterns of tones.…

Tested recognition memory for items and spatial location by varying picture and word stimuli across four slide quadrants. Results showed a pictorial superiority effect for item recognition and a greater ability to remember the spatial location of pictures versus words for both old and young adults (N=95). (WAS)

Three groups of kindergarten children received four training trials and a word-recognition test with 15 words in a beginning-reading task. The prompting-and-fading and the no-prompting groups performed similarly on word recognition after training and scored significantly higher than the prompting-only group. (Author)

Children aged 6 to 13 years were given verbal and nonverbal fluency tasks and block design subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised. Results, providing normative data, showed that fluency tasks are age-, but not sex-dependent, and are modestly correlated to one another. (Author/CM)

Two experiments were conducted to assess whether the distribution of fixation times might be related to the prevailing cognitive activity involved with two different tasks, i.e., driving and observing colored fields. The results suggest that the distribution of fixation times can be associated with the prevailing cognitive activity while viewing.…

Studied the relationship between depression and humor in 85 college students who took the Beck Depression Inventory and then rated 10 cartoons. Results showed no difference between mildly depressed and nondepressed subjects. However, some trends were noted on a mood scale related to immediate feelings and humor preference. (Author/JAC)

The effect of educational television background music on selective exposure and information acquisition was studied. Background music of slow tempo, regardless of its appeal, had negligible effects on attention and information acquisition. Rhythmic, fast-tempo background music, especially when appealing, significantly reduced visual attention to…

The functions of spaces between words in adult reading of text were investigated in three experiments. Results were consistent with a two-process theory in which filling parafoveal spaces disrupts guidance of the next eye movement and filling foveal spaces disrupts processing of the fixated word as well. (Author/RD)

Studied the ability of 9-, 12-, and 14-year-old dyslexics to recall auditorily presented letter strings. The children showed a normal phonemic confusibility effect, although overall their recall was much poorer than chronological age controls; their recall levels were similar to those of their reading age controls. (Author)

Children 3 to 6 years of age learned simple Spanish vocabulary items using an adaptation of the keyword method of foreign language vocabulary learning. Children who used the keyword method remembered more vocabulary translations than children who were not instructed in keyword method usage. (Author/RD)

Compared intellectually gifted children and controls on their ability to name and classify words and pictures of high or low frequency. High IQ children had shorter response latencies than other children and also showed no word frequency effects in the word naming tasks. (Author)

Acquisition of style recognition was studied in a category abstraction paradigm. Subjects classified impressionist paintings, according to artist, and were tested for immediate or delayed transfer. Experience with examples of a style yielded greater classification accuracy for new examples. Conceptual structure was correlated with transfer…

A technique is introduced to study the flow of information through processing stages in choice reaction time tasks. It was designed to determine whether response preparation can begin before stimulus identification is complete ("continuous" models) or if a stimulus must be fully identified prior to any response activation…