An experiment tested the effects of Feedback, Control, Distance, and Relevance on Person's attraction to Other in various roles. Other results are also discussed. (DB)

When time for task completion was reduced, performance of 30 educable mentally retarded elementary students on a peg placement task did not degrade, although too much or too little available time increased the use of random placement. (Author/CL)

The Institute at Virginia has focused its efforts on learning disability (LD) children with attentional problems with emphasis on cognitive behavior modification techniques. Studies included investigations of metacognition, information processing, self-recording of task-related behavior, and strategy training. Adult-child interactions and…

A comparison of the effects of methylphenidate (Ritalin) and response cost in reducing the offtask behavior of two boys (7 and 8 years old) with attentional deficit disorders and hyperactivity revealed that response cost (with free time as the reinforcer) was superior to Ritalin in increasing ontask behavior and improving academic performance.…

The Goldman Lock Box provides two measures of self-regulation, planfulness and maintenance of goal-directed behavior. Lock Box performance of 25 children with down syndrome was compared with that of 43 typically developing children, matched for mental age. Children in both groups showed similar levels of competence, planfulness and…

The study of four autistic children, aged six-nine, found support for the hypothesis that persistent pronominal errors by autistic children can be explained by failure to observe pronouns in speech addressed to another person, an aspect of language development in normal children. (Author/DB)

Adolescents identified letters presented to them on the basis of color. Subjects (n=20) with mental retardation exhibited facilitation when the target was identical to the target on the preceding trial but did not exhibit inhibition when it had been a distractor on the preceding trial. Inefficient suppression processes may result in performance…

The introduction to this special issue on preschool issues in autism summarizes the other papers, which focus on general issues, development of attention and imitation during the preschool years, nonverbal communication of young children with autism, and instructional techniques. (DB)

Two experiments examined age differences in children's dual-task performance. Findings indicated that when capacity for single-task performance was controlled, age differences between second and fifth graders did not exist in performance of dual-tasks of equal priority. When tasks had different priorities, only fifth graders could differentially…

Attentional allocation in feature-search mode (W. F. Bacon & H. E. Egeth, 1994) is thought to be solely determined by top-down factors, with no role for stimulus-driven salience. The authors reassessed this conclusion using variants of the spatial cuing and rapid serial visual presentation paradigms developed by C. L. Folk and colleagues (C. L.…

Four experiments explored the task span procedure: Subjects received lists of 1-10 task names to remember and then lists of 1-10 stimuli on which to perform the tasks. Task span is the number of tasks performed in order perfectly. Experiment 1 compared the task span with the traditional memory span in 6 practiced subjects and found little…

Comments on analysis of attention tasks in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) provided by Wilding (2005)points out that whereas many regulatory functions, including alertness or arousal, appear to be impaired in ADHD, demonstrating basic attention deficits in selection or orienting functions in the disorder has proven difficult. Yet…

The purpose of the present study was to replicate and extend to word recognition previous findings of reduced magnitude and reliability of laterality effects when exogenous cueing was used in a dichotic listening task with syllable pairs. Twenty right-handed undergraduate students with normal hearing (10 females, 10 males) completed a dichotic…

The authors investigated whether memory for object locations in pictures could be exploited to address known difficulties of designing query languages for picture databases. M. W. Lansdale's (1998) model of location memory was adapted to 4 experiments observing memory for everyday pictures. These experiments showed that location memory is…

A qualitative study of group therapy for aphasia was undertaken in order to discover interaction patterns and discourse management strategies that help define "social" or "conversation" group therapy for aphasia. Specifically, an analysis of the discourse of clients and therapists was conducted to identify patterns across therapists and settings.…