Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a…

A series of microgenetic experiments was conducted to examine the role of experience on 2.5- to 5-year-old children's discovery of spatial mapping strategies. With experience, 3- to 4-year-olds discovered a strategy for mapping corresponding locations that shared both featural and spatial similarities. When featural and spatial correspondences…

Although field studies in human geography have some advantages over restricted classroom and laboratory studies, special methodological and ethical concerns arise. For example, field studies are able to take into account the complexity of events in natural settings as opposed to the controlled setting of a laboratory, particularly when subjects…

A simple photometer constructed from an LED and an op amp can be used to measure light in a number of physical situations. A variety of LEDs exist to investigate different wavelength ranges. Combined with an inexpensive transit, the LED photometer can be used to carry out skylight studies and atmospheric optical depth measurements. The activities…

While it is often assumed that a single mechanism underlies varied experimental evidences of selectivity, Berlyne (1969) suggested that attention-like selectivity may take place in a number of quite separate neural systems. This study examined the issue of visuospatial attention by investigating covert orientation or "looking out of the corner of…

Studies of selective attention suggest a system which operates across modalities and on many forms of internal representation. Complex analysis, even semantic analysis, of sensory input may occur automatically, but attention controls the locus of action. When computations carried out by the brain are effortful, in the sense that elements compete…

Males have consistently been noted to perform better than females on Piagetian horizontality and verticality tasks. To examine whether females are less competent than males or whether mediating variables influence females' performance, 42 male and 42 female college students performed horizontality and verticality tasks. Subjects also rated their…

The study compared the performance of schizophrenic patients and normal controls in their ability to direct visual attention. The first experiment compared 12 adult schizophrenic patients with 30 control volunteers in their ability to orient attention in response to peripheral visual cues. The patients were distinguished from controls by a slower…

A study is described in which the acquisition of "in,""on," and "under" was studied controlling for the non-linguistic strategies suggested by Clark's (1974) ordered rules, as well as controlling for stimuli bias. Clark's rules were: (1) If Y is a container, put X "in" it; and if Y is not a container, but…

The extent to which sex differences on a mental rotation test were related to ocular dominance, handedness, and familial handedness was explored. The Vandenberg revision of the Shepard-Metzlar mental rotation test was administered to 206 college students. The test consisted of 20 criterion figures, each followed by two correct and two incorrect…

Research on the development of perceptuomotor coordination in sighted children, specifically, the ability to (1) reach to objects, (2) explore objects once they have been attained, and (3) use actions to transform spatial relationships, is reviewed for implications for development of perceptuomotor skills in visually impaired children. (Author/DB)

Meta-analysis of the literature (47 studies) comparing spatial task performance of blind and sighted subjects found that early onset (of blindness) groups generally showed poorer performance than either the late onset or the sighted groups. (Author/DB)

The predictability of individual differences in the ability to reason about dynamic displays from tests using static displays was studied in 170 adults given paper-and-pencil and computer controlled tests. Several multivariate analyses indicated that the ability to reason about dynamic motion was distinct from the ability to reason about static…

Because previous studies had suggestd that Down Syndrome subjects did not respond to changes in directional probability within a complex motor task as did other retarded subjects, 14 Down Syndrome 18-year-olds were given training relative to the directional probability component of the task. Performance was improved but primarily in terms of…

Examined ways in which irrelevant variations within a stimulus set interfered with performances of second and fifth graders and adults in a selective attention task. Stimuli were constructed from spatially integrated dimensions in experiment 1 and spatially separated dimensions in experiment 2. Developmental differences in perceived structure were…