To assess the effects of familiar social stimuli on arousal in a novel and mildly stressful environment, skin conductance was measured in 4-year-old nursery school children who experienced this environment under two conditions: (a) alone, and (b) in the presence of a close friend. The study was intended to test Zajonc's (1965) social facilitation…

A study investigated changes in recognition time for short sentences presented on television screens of varying sizes with viewers at varying distances. In a posttest only control group design, subjects in several different groups viewed a series of similar sentences under conditions where screen size and distance from the screen were varied. The…

Using second grade children, this study was designed to investigate the differences (or lack of differences) among the Interview, the Picture Stimulus Interview, and the Free Play Situation techniques in the categories of productivity, thought groups, compound structures, complex structures, and words per thought group as a means of gaining a…

Dwelling on the primary ecological functions of life, energy, and matter, this book offers an artistic and graphic display of fundamental knowledge and beliefs about the environment. It seeks to contribute to a widespread appreciation of the earth's limits, to the shaping of human attitudes toward the earth and to increasing environmental…

Research conducted to determine the effect of certain measurable characteristics of written material upon speed of memorization is presented. The characteristics studied fall into four classes: (1) Load measures reflecting informational density, (2) Length measures based upon number of syllables, words, kernel sentences, clauses, or sentences in a…

This experiment examined developmental changes in the ability of infants to learn conceptual categories regarding the human face. A total of 108 infants, aged 18, 24, and 30 weeks, were habituated to (1) the same face in the same orientation, (2) the same face in differing orientations, or (3) different faces in different orientations. All…

This paper discusses three studies which examined the interaction of dimensional dominance with the attentional components of alertness and encoding. In Study I, twenty 6- and 7-year-olds observed thirty 3-second exposures of a color, then participated in a 40-trial choice reaction time task in which the familiarized color and a novel color served…

This study was designed to: (1) investigate differential responding to stimuli that differ along a continuum of degree of discrepancy from a familiarized standard; and (2) attempt to determine if infants will show response decrement and recovery to conceptual categories. Fifty-five infants at two age levels (10 and 16 weeks) were familiarized with…

The information processing terms "content" and "address" are used to describe structural differences between the constructs of individual identity and identity in the equivalence sense. In both cases a sameness relation is established in spite of specific differences. The resulting constructs of identity are known to be…

Metaphors of similarity and proportionality, together with a pictorial form of similarity metaphors, proverbs, and several Piaget-type cognitive tasks, were given to 50 boys aged 5 through 13 years. Results indicated that metaphor comprehension is a type of classificatory behavior, the development of which is related to maturing cognitive…

An experiment is reported which shows that with identical preceding context, the same initial phoneme targets contained in high transitional probability words were responded to significantly faster than those in low transitional probability words. The result argues for the importance of transitional probability as an independent variable in…

Reports two experiments which examined developmental changes in the patterns of preference for varying degrees of perspective while controlling for the station point used in viewing. Subjects were 28 preschool children (age four years), 23 elementary school students (age six years) and 30 college students from introductory psychology classes. (MP)

A computer/tape recorder interface was designed, which permits automatic oral adminstration of "true-false" or "multiple-choice" type tests. This paper describes the hardware and control program software, which were developed to implement the method on a DEC PDP 11 computer. (Author/JKS)

An experiment tests conjectures that right ear advantage (REA) has an auditory origin in competition or interference between acoustically similar stimuli and that feature-sharing effect (FSE) has its origin in assignment of features of phonetically similar stimuli. No effect on the REA for acoustic similarity, and a clear effect of acoustic…

Although painting is still recognized as an international language, few people are actually capable of "reading" the great works of art that have given depth to mankind's existence. Here is a lesson in "reading a painting". (Author/RK)