This study examined 2- to 3-year-olds' ability to make a pretend-real distinction in the absence of content cues. Children watched two actors side by side. One was really eating, and the other was pretending to eat, but in neither case was information about content available. Following the displays, children were asked to retrieve the real food…

Background: Investigations of the cognitive processes underlying specific language impairment (SLI) have implicated deficits in the storage and processing of phonological information, but to date these abilities have not been studied in the same group of children with SLI. Aims: To examine the extent to which deficits in immediate verbal…

The current study examined the reinforcing effects of choosing among alternatives in a four-part evaluation. In the first study, initial-link responses in a concurrent-chains arrangement resulted in access to terminal links in which the completion of an academic task resulted in (a) the choice of a reinforcer (choice), (b) the delivery of an…

How long does it take to form a durable representation in visual working memory? Several theorists have proposed that this consolidation process is very slow. Here, we measured the time course of consolidation. Observers performed a change-detection task for colored squares, and shortly after the presentation of the first array, pattern masks were…

Case reports and sensory inventories suggest that autism involves sensory processing anomalies. Behavioral tests indicate impaired motion and normal form perception in autism. The present study used first-person accounts to investigate perceptual anomalies and related subjective to psychophysical measures. Nine high-functioning children with…

The influences of domain-specific meteorological knowledge and general visual-spatial abilities on the comprehension of simple weather maps were examined in a regression-based study involving a sample of participants with relatively low meteorological knowledge and in an experiment involving a contrast between samples of higher- and…

Bilingual reading can require more than knowing two languages. Learners must acquire also the writing conventions of their second language, which can differ in its deep mapping principles (writing system) and its visual configurations (script). We review ERP (event-related potential) and fMRI studies of both Chinese-English bilingualism and…

Two experiments were conducted to determine the relative importance of style of movement versus physical appearance in person recognition. The first study investigated the capabilities of young children and adults to recognize target individuals' styles or manners of movement and to distinguish between people when their faces were not visible. A…

This study investigated the hypothesis that there is a developmental trend toward greater flexibility of strategies in visual selection. Subjects were 48 second and sixth graders. (Author/SDH)

The ability of 1-month-old infants to recognize their mothers visually was explored with the live faces of mother and stranger presented in three different poses: en face (full face), half-profile, and profile. Subjects were 16 infants with normal Apgar scores at birth who were volunteered by their parents after an initial contact in a maternity…

This report summarizes the results of more than 10,000 individual judgments, carried out in five related studies, all concerned with perceived reading efforts of text on visual displays and printouts. Students and personnel in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Stockholm served as study subjects. In experiments in which…

Young children matching the orientation of (a) identical realistic figures that could form mirror images of each other, or (b) nonidentical realistic figures that could not form mirror images, produced the same pattern of errors. The explanation proposed is a strategy of matching analogous parts of the two figures. (Author/SDH)

Elementary school children made same-different judgments of prototypes of letterlike forms paired with transforms of these prototypes generated on a dimension either critical or noncritical for object identification. Results challenge the view that dimensions irrelevant in object identification are ignored or not detected in graphic…