Participants from a fitness club were randomly assigned to control (n=50), placebo (n=50), and stimulus control (n=100) groups to study the isolated effects of stimulus control on attendance. Control stimulus group was given "exercise" key chains as the stimulus control. Stimulus control by itself was not an effective intervention for…

This article discusses findings concerning the plasticity of auditory cortical processing mechanisms in adults, including the effects of restricted cochlear damage or behavioral training with acoustic stimuli on the frequency selectivity of auditory cortical neurons and evidence for analogous injury- and use-related plasticity in the adult human…

A bird study found that with sufficient time and training after hair cell and hearing loss and hair cell regeneration, the mature avian auditory system can accommodate input from a newly regenerated periphery sufficiently to allow for recognition of previously familiar vocalizations and the learning of new complex acoustic classifications.…

Effects of training with 6 students (ages 7-9) with moderate mental retardation were assessed during five conditions. In four conditions, words were presented either alone or with corresponding pictures. In the fifth condition, pictures were used to provide feedback. Acquisition was achieved fastest during the word-alone conditions with 5…

A project developed and evaluated an intermediate form of presentation that provides a virtual dynamic tactile display for use with computers that could complement static tactile displays of graphical material. The device is a two-dimensional extension of the tactile mouse and provides contour and slope information to the user. (Contains nine…

Examined the role of the psychological process of comparison in young children's ability to extend a novel adjective to other objects sharing a salient property whether objects are of the same or different basic-level categories. Found that comparison operates in conjunction with naming to support extension of novel adjectives to properties of…

Current cognitive learning theory stresses the importance of observational learning and interactions with other people. Motion pictures have value for instruction for two reasons: film is a popular medium due to its visual format and its resulting sensory impact; and film is a form of vicarious interaction with other people. (Author/AEF)

Data are presented to document the initial dramatic reduction in self-injurious behavior and the ongoing effectiveness of contingent electric shock treatment of an adolescent. Positive effects of the intervention are documented, as is information on the interaction of a medical condition, psychoactive mediation status, and staff changes. (Contains…

A nested cross-over design was used to examine the effects of visual condition, type of stimuli, and language proficiency on listening comprehension items of the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Three two-way interactions were significant: proficiency by type of stimuli, type of stimuli by visual condition, and type of stimuli by time.…

States that various studies have revealed excellent recognition memory of pictures when participants are asked to remember what has been presented. Explores unpracticed memory for the English five pound bank note. States that results point to dramatic memory failure and to misrepresentations in memory. (CMK)

Examines the utility of visual cues as a form of antecedent management for promoting task engagement and lessening the effects of severe and challenging behavior among children with autism. Specific guidelines for designing and implementing activity schedules are described, and a case study is presented. (Author/CR)

Examines learning in the domain of sentence parsing and syntax tree-diagram construction to assess whether subjects could learn "vicariously" from recordings of interactions between a previous student and a tutor. Findings indicate that reusable dialog is a useful resource for the vicarious learner and that unannotated animated diagrams…

When presented with stimuli that contain illegal consonant clusters, Japanese listeners tend to hear an illusory vowel that makes their perception conform to the phonotactics of the language. Assesses an alternate hypothesis that this illusion is due to a top-down lexical effect. (Author/VWL)

In this study, younger and older adults heard either just word onsets, word onsets followed by white noise indicating word duration, or word onsets followed by signals indicating word prosody. Older adults required longer stimulus durations for word recognition with hearing sensitivity a significant factor. Word recognition was facilitated equally…

Eight crows were taught to discriminate overlapping pairs of visual stimuli (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-). For 4 birds, the stimuli were colored cards with a circle of the same color on the reverse side whose diameter decreased from A to E (ordered feedback group). These circles were made available for comparison to potentially help the crows…