This study examined whether pitch patterns of prelinguistic vocalizations could discriminate between social vocalizations, uttered apparently with the intention to communicate, and "private" speech, related to solitary activities as an expression of "thinking". Four healthy ten month old English-speaking infants (2 boys and 2 girls) were…

The problem of designing computer programs that will approach human capabilities in pattern recognition is discussed. Human beings are much better at recognizing patterns that are highly structured than at recognizing patterns that are not. In contrast, a computer system's performance in pattern recognition is almost independent of the amount of…

Reducing letters to stick symbols facilitates learning spelling patterns for beginning readers, remedial students, adults, and people for whom English is a second language. (JM)

Examined the development of pattern recognition in infant pigtailed macaques using the familiarization novelty technique. Results indicate that by at least 200 days postconception subjects show a consistently reliable visual response to novelty. (Author/RH)

Thirty elementary school students were assigned to one of three experimental conditions, (labeling, imagery, or control) in a pattern reproduction task. (ST)

Young children were given tasks in which they were to identify small variations in complex patterns. Results indicated the children were able to perform the task more accurately than developmental models would have predicted. (ST)

An operant conditioning technique was used to study visual discrimination of simple patterns by infants aged 6-12 weeks. The appropriate direction of head turning to the patterns was developed and maintained by social reinforcement. Results showed that visual discriminative control of the direction of head turning can be achieved. (WY)

An experiment using a computer to assign content designators to unedited machine readable bibliographic data to create MARC records is described. (Author)

Investigates the ability of four-, seven-, and ten-month-old infants to perceive and base novelty responses on correlations among perceptual attributes in a category-like context. In a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, ten-month-old infants clearly responded on the basis of the correlation among attributes, while four- and seven-month-old…

Differences in visual encoding speed for reading is related to differences in ability to access memory codes for other meaningful patterns. This difference is shown in the advantage of better readers in reaction time in deciding if two line drawings belonged to the same category. Better readers have faster access for any meaningful pattern. (PJM)

A series of five experiments explore the 7-month-old infant's ability to discriminate among photos of faces. The infant's tendency to choose visual targets for inspection provides evidence of discrimination and recognition. (Author/JH)

A rule-plus-exception model (RULEX) of classification learning is proposed. According to RULEX, people learn to classify objects by forming simple logical rules and remembering occasional exceptions to these rules. Because the learning process is stochastic, people will vary in the rules formed and exceptions stored. (SLD)

Three experiments examined whether limitations in perceptual ability by 24 individuals with mental retardation extended to learning perceptual categories based on elements of actions. Individuals with mental retardation had difficulty identifying some actions, slower decision times for activity identification, and could not identify the actor's…