Girls in Grades 7, 8, and 9 practiced mirror-tracing in a neutral colored room to a criterion before being tested in their preferred or nonpreferred colored rooms. The errors decreased significantly in the preferred room, while the time to complete changed minimally. (Author)

Describes an experiment in which biofeedback training was used with student instrumentalists to decrease unnecessary muscular tension and fatigue and to improve dexterity and speed. (SJL)

Tachistoscopic tests to identify three-letter words and simple geometric shapes were administered to 64 Italian children, ages 7-8. Results showed no significant differences in visual perceptual threshold between the two hemifields for either test, which was interpreted as confirming a lesser and not definitely determined lateralization in…

A technique is introduced to study the flow of information through processing stages in choice reaction time tasks. It was designed to determine whether response preparation can begin before stimulus identification is complete ("continuous" models) or if a stimulus must be fully identified prior to any response activation…

Letter encoding is typically viewed as an automatic process that is both obligatory and interference free. In these experiments, either familiar or non-familiar primes produced significant amounts of interference even when subjects were trying to ignore the visual input. Early perceptual components of encoding are both obligatory and resource…

Only 11 of 22 mildly retarded young adults successfully passed a criterion pretest involving discriminating pairs of upright same-different cones. The 11 Ss performed poorly on a second task involving a more complex transformation. Ss who failed the criterion task produced primarily egocentric responses. (Author)

Two experiments using varying duration exposures related reading skill in adults to initial encoding of location information. Results suggest that the role of perception in reading has been underestimated because emphasis has been on item perception, not perception of spatial location. (Author/CP)

A cost-benefit and speed-accuracy analysis of semantic priming in a lexical decision task provided information relevant to the automatic-conscious distinction as well as to the operation of discriminability, criterion bias, and response bias in the facilitation. (Author/MH)

Investigates the differential effect of modeling procedures on slow and fast responders' performance on a haptic-visual matching test. Also studies the differential effect of modeling of impulsive v reflective modes of responding, and of model success v model failure. (Author/SS)

Paragraph recall was easier if prior information, presented as elaborations of the paragraph sentences, was precise, rather than irrelevant or imprecise. Precise information also permitted quick and efficient elaboration of new information. (Author/CP)

The effects of several factors on expended processing capacity were measured. Expended processing capacity was greater when information was retrieved from secondary memory than from primary memory, when processing was of a deep, semantic nature than when it was shallow and physical, and when processing was more elaborate. (Author/GDC)

The ability of 24 moderately retarded adults to anticipate a signal to initiate discrete movements of varying complexity was investigated in two experiements. The results revealed an interaction between temporal anticipation and response complexity. (Author)

Three problem-solving strategies--working backward from the unknown, forward from the given, and mixed--were applied to interrelated algebra equations. The mixed strategy was most popular and most efficient with grouped variables. Memory load or information-processing load differences among the strategies were evident. (CP)

The response times of 32 process schizophrenics and 16 nonhospitalized controls were compared on three visual search tasks. Results suggest that process schizophrenics are not abnormally slow when extracting information from visual displays, and they appear to perform similar operations and strategies to those of normals when doing so. (Editor/RK)

This study explored differences among 10 children with Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD), 10 age-matched peers, and 10 young adults, by examining vocal reaction time when presented with printed one- and two-syllable words. Children with CAPD produced significantly more errors than their peers or adults, specifically for long-delay…