This article describes the Descriptive Video Service (DVS), developed by WGBH-TV in Boston, Massachusetts, to provide narrated descriptions of the key visual elements of television programs without interfering with their audio or dialogue. The article discusses the history of DVS, broadcast tests, reactions to DVS, and the future of DVS.…

Two experiments examined pigeons' generalization to intermediate forms following training of concept discriminations. In Experiment 1, the training stimuli were sets of images of dogs and cats, and the transfer stimuli were head/body chimeras, which humans tend to categorize more readily in terms of the head part rather than the body part. In…

The article describes a unit for seventh-grade students, using children's literature to teach visual, auditory, and algebraic patterns. (Contains 7 figures.)

We report four experiments designed to determine whether visual information affects judgments of acoustically-specified nonspeech events as well as speech events (the "McGurk effect"). Previous findings have shown only weak McGurk effects for nonspeech stimuli, whereas strong effects are found for consonants. We used click sounds that…

In this study of changes in children's social schemata, kindergarten, fourth and eighth grade children were asked to place felt figures on a felt board in any way they wished. Pictures were analyzed to determine age-related changes in schemata to organize different groups of human figures and discussed in terms of the development of social…

Two studies investigating figurative expectancy, or the tendency to make perceptual judgments on the basis of temporal patterns, are reported. The results are interpreted as supportive of Piaget's theory of perceptual development. (JMB)

Eighty nursery school and upper elementary school children selected picture cards from varying stimulus arrays in order to indicate their preference for unorganized mixed collections, groups of identical cards, or sets of different cards that together formed a whole figure. (CW)

Evaluates the use of 5-year-olds' scores on a picture reading task to predict the children's later reading performance. Suggests that the picture reading task measures differences in children's understanding of the nature and purpose of reading. (CW)

The intent of this study is to compare tactile, visual and auditory temporal numerosity discrimination by having subjects count the number of stimuli presented to a single locus. (Author)

The present study attempted to further analyze the interaction of verbal and image coding processes in memory for pictures and words. (Author)

The present study utilized complex visual stimuli to investigate possible mechanisms for temporal coding because such stimuli seemed to provide a close analogue of events in daily life. (Author)

Pulsation threshold (PT) masking was used to assess frequency resolution among infants 3 and 6 months of age and adults. The masker intensity at which the pulsing probe becomes indistinguishable from a physically continuous probe is the PT. A measure of frequency resolution can be obtained by examining the effects of masker frequency on the PT. In…

This study investigated: (1) whether infants can develop expectations for events that alternate along the vertical axis; and (2) whether infants who form expectations with one action set can transfer them to a different action set--that is, from vertical to horizontal eye movements. A total of 32 infants of 3 months of age saw one of two picture…