Four groups of 10- to 16-year-old educable mental retardates listened to a 20-sentence story; subjects (1) viewed pictures; (2) generated mental pictures; (3) heard each sentence twice; or (4) listened to the story once. Recall of story information was highest for those who viewed pictures. (Author/GDC)

Two experiments used the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results demonstrated that task-specific variables could be the primary determinants of how subjects verify…

The contrast between holistic and differentiated perception of multidimensional stimuli is reconceptualized. Hypotheses about the experiential status of dimensions within holistic perception were tested as explanations of children's general perceptual mode and of adults' integral mode. Three levels of dimensional status are described. (Author/RD)

In a modification of the sentence-picture comprehension task (Chase & Clark, 1972), 70 university undergraduates verified sentence-picture pairs. The findings limit the generalizability of any linguistic comparison model; two different comprehension strategies were used consistently by different subjects, whose choices of strategy were predictable…

Teachers and testers should encourage children to repeat or restate verbal stimuli in order to enhance their comprehension. Changing the administration of a language comprehension test to include such restatement significantly raised the mean test scores of four- and five-year old Head Start children. (CTM)

When a formula for assessing the language stimulation value of pictures was applied to several basal readers, the results indicated that most of the pictures were of low potency or stimulation potential. (MKM)

Residual hearing capabilities of nine severely and profoundly retarded deaf-blind children (7-13 years old) were determined with an operant procedure that allowed the children to respond by making a selection between two responses, one which resulted in the presentation of auditory reinforcement or one which resulted in no reinforcement.…

This study focused on the psychological process involved in drawing inferences from pictures. Nineteen reference tests and two tests of picture interpretation behavior were administered to a random sample of 95 children aged 10-12: the Production of Inference Tests (PIT) and the Discovery of Similarities Test (DST). (JEG)

An incidental memory paradigm was used to study involuntary encoding processes and voluntary retrieval strategies in children's memory. Subjects were 16 preschool children and 16 kindergarten children. (Author/MP)

Children learned two linear function rules under varying conditions: presence vs. absence of pointing; visual cues (context vs. weight vs. both pictured); and a verbal-only baseline condition. A complex rule was learned as a transfer task. Visual cues aided both learning and transfer; pointing helped initial learning, but retarded transfer.…

Short-term memory recognition scores and strategies were investigated in 10 learning disabled and 10 educable mentally retarded (EMR) students (10-13 years old). (Author/CL)

Voluntary Visual Attention concerns "natural" viewing behavior or visual browsing when the subject is under no constraints regarding the distribution of attention. A general overview of this area of psychological investigation is presented. (Author/JKS)

The effects of positive reinforcement on an 8-year-old partially sighted girl's visual academic performance were assessed, using a multiple baseline design that involved tasks of matching and of counting number sets. (Author/DLS)

Finds that pictures are useful in communication-oriented foreign language teaching, though not in skill-oriented; however, attention must be given to "pragmalinguistic" and perceptual/psychological points of view when introducing visual materials. Examples are given, with concise suggestions for teaching. Political cartoons and comics are…

Twelve one-word-stage children were given minimally contrasting two-word instructions. Since non-linguistic cues were eliminated, comprehension involved making non-syntactic inferences from the word combinations. The children could respond correctly to some of the instructions, and even carried out some unfamiliar activities. (Author/SW)