Preschool children's problem solving processes are investigated in both direct and indirect ways. Direct investigations focus on substantive and methodological issues related to how children solve a few well defined puzzles, such as the Tower of Hanoi and the Tangram. Indirect investigations deal with related issues: U-shaped (or non-monotone)…

An information-processing view of perceptual motor performance holds that the processes involved in perception are organizational and depend on past experiences. In motor tasks which require anticipation, an individual uses past experience to predict what may happen. Yet bias effects in perceptual judgments, including bias caused by contextual…

Measurements of various parameters derived from different reaction time (RT) paradigms are found to be correlated with psychometric measurements of general mental ability. Such RT-derived measurements, when combined in a multiple regression equation, predict some 50 percent or more of the variance in intelligence. This relationship of intelligence…

Generalizability theory was applied to the Matching Familiar Figures Test (MFF), an instrument commonly employed to assess reflection-impulsivity in children, in order to analyze the dependability of the MFF at four grade levels: second, third, fourth, and fifth. The MFF was individually administered to 114 boys. A completely crossed, two-facet…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perceptual processes involved in haptic exploration of randomly generated shapes. Experiment one required subjects to detect symmetrical or asymmetrical characteristics of individually presented plastic shapes, also varying in complexity. Scanning time for both symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes…

Two experiments related to the development of verbal self-control in children were conducted. In the first experiment, 36 adults and 36 four year olds were administered a vocal alone, a motor alone, and a combined-reaction-time task. In the second experiment, 54 kindergarten subjects and 60 fifth-grade subjects were each administered a double…

Many self-concept measures employ several different scales to which the subject responds in a set order at one sitting. This study examined the effects of different testing conditions on such scales. Bill's Index of Adjustment and Values was administered to 191 graduate students under two different sequences, and two time delay conditions. The…

The project report summarized here describes the interrelationships of the individually administered tests given to 820 Head Start children from three urban sites in the second year of a longitudinal study. These results are compared with those obtained in Year 1, the year prior to the students' attendance in a group program. The tests tapped…

The purpose of this study was to modify the conceptual tempo (response style on a reflective-impulsive dimension) by training impulsive children to increase their response latency or by teaching more effective search strategies and scanning techniques. Subjects were 169 second graders from two lower class area schools. Each subject was assigned to…

Mean response times and slope of response times were correlated with intelligence and achievement for 94 sixth-graders. Mean response time reliability was greater than that of slope, and correlated significantly with IQ and achievement. Speed of processing information generalized across experimental tasks and reliably indicated intellectual…

Ten young males (aged 16-to-22 years) whose IQ scores ranged from 51 to 77 were compared on a simple discrimination task with ten male university students (aged 18-to-23 years) and 28 nonretarded male children (aged 7-to-11 years) in order to determine if reaction time is a consequence of mental retardation.

Four experiments investigated memory scanning rates of skilled and less skilled readers. In three experiments, reaction times of skilled readers were faster than those of less skilled readers with reading time partialled out (aloud and silent reading). Differences were not significant when the scan component in answering was minimized. (Author/RD)

A new method for determining the durations of mental events, the method of special effects, was developed and applied to a series of three experiments. The method measures the effects of various context stimuli on the speed of responses to a probe stimulus. By varying the interval between onset of context and probe, the time courses of these…

In an attempt to replicate and extend previous findings on autonomic arousal and responsivity in children with minimal brain dysfunction (MBD), pupil size, heart rate, skin conductance, and skin temperature were recorded from 32 MBD and 45 control children (6-13 years old). (Author/CL)

The time taken to name 56 drawings of objects on five separate occasions were analyzed for 21 ESN(M) children (i.e., moderately educationally subnormal) and 21 ESN(S) children (i.e., severely educationally subnormal), matched for picture-naming vocabulary. Results were discussed in terms of the Oldfield (1964) and Lachman (1973) models of lexical…