This paper investigates the effects of age and sex on the spontaneous helping behavior of preschool children. Forty-six middle-class children, 22 boys and 24 girls, attending school in a small city in northeastern Kansas took part in the study. Children were divided by median split into younger and older groups. Taped interactions of children with…

The rapidity with which mothers respond to their infants' vocalizations by either vocalizing or verbalizing was compared for five male and five female later-born, (i.e., not first-born) children and their mothers. Videotapes were made from behind a one-way mirror when infants were 2, 26, 52, and 78 weeks of age; each tape represented a five-minute…

This study examined the relationship of tutorial enrichment of cognitive processes and reinforcement of lengthened response latency to measurements of impulsivity in 3- and 4-year-old children in a typical preschool setting. In a pretest-posttest control group design, 48 impulsive subjects (24 male and 24 female) were randomly assigned to tutorial…

The present investigation looked at selective attention in impulsive and reflective children using a central/incidental task similar to that used by Hagen, 1967. In order to examine developmental change in selective attention, children at kindergarten, second, and fifth grades were tested. The central recall task involved presenting the child with…

Jerome Kagen, who developed instruments to measure and classify the aspect of man's psychological make-up known as conceptual tempo, generated 3 conceptual tempos: reflective, impulsive, and neutral. These tempos are determined by measuring latency time (time lapse) from stimulus to first response and recording the number of errors made. In this…

Response latency was studied as a measure of associative strength or degree of learning and possible basis for instructional decision making in computer-assisted instruction. Latency was investigated in a paired-associate task as a function of training procedure and information transmission requirements during acquisition and overlearning. The…

Research in paired-associate overlearning sought means of decreasing the variability while maintaining the magnitude of the decrement in stimulus-response latency (SRL). SRL was divided into decision latency (DL) and manual response latency (MRL); it was hypothesized that self-pacing of inter-item intervals would reduce V. Group I received stimuli…

The effects of distraction on achievement are particularly important in relation to the acceptability of computer-assisted instructional materials. In addition to these effects, various levels of anxiety may also be deleterious to the learner. In order to measure the effects of both distraction and anxiety 121 subjects were used in a two-by-two…

This study investigated the underlying disorder of certain children who may have normal or above-normal intelligence, yet fail to read at levels appropriate to their ages. Twenty-two poor readers and 22 normal readers were matched on sex, age (7 to 12 years), and IQ (94 to 130). Examination of school records revealed that many poor readers were…

This paper discusses three studies which examined the interaction of dimensional dominance with the attentional components of alertness and encoding. In Study I, twenty 6- and 7-year-olds observed thirty 3-second exposures of a color, then participated in a 40-trial choice reaction time task in which the familiarized color and a novel color served…

Four possible mechanisms for short-term item recognition are distinguished. Manipulations of recency, particularly of negative probe items, provide critical tests. Two experiments were conducted using Sternberg's varied-set reaction time paradigm, coupled with procedures intended to minimize rehearsal and control the recency of probes and memory…

Reaction time to verify property statements was examined in the context of two semantic distance factors--typicality of the category member in the subject of the statement, and dominance of the category member's property in the predicate. (Author/NCR)

In a study of the effects of instructions on reaction times to judgments of the truth or falsity of sentences, 40 undergraduates were provided computer-assisted instruction by either the "true" or "conversion" model and required to judge 64 sentences of all possible combinations of true or false, affirmative or negative, and expletive or…

This paper presents the rationale for a questionnaire measure of individual differences in stimulus screening--namely, individual differences in automatic screening of irrelevant stimuli and rapid habituation to distracting, irrelevant stimuli. All components of the questionnaire were intercorrelated and represented a unitary dimension of…

Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy report that semantic context has a larger effect on visually degraded words than on undegraded words. Degrading stimuli takes place by superimposing a dot pattern over letters thereby slowing information processing. Four experiments explore alternative explanations of this research finding. (Editor/RK)