The effects of increasing the load of materials to be moved on rapid movement of these materials were measured using two dependent variables. The first analysis involved overall mean movement time (MT) and segmental movement times. The second analysis dealt with movement time variability evidenced by within subject MT and segmental MT standard…

The present study was designed to determine if subjects of different ages are equally distracted by meaningless perceptual and by semantic features of potentially interfering information. In contrast to a Stroop-like task, figures instead of words were used as possibly interfering information. First graders, fourth graders, and college students…

A discrete color naming paradigm was used in two experiments examining activation along orthographic and phonological dimensions in visual and auditory word recognition. Subjects were 80 college students who were presented with a prime word, either auditorally or visually, followed 200 milliseconds later by a target word printed in a color. The…

This experiment examined two processes which might account for developmental increases in accuracy in visual recognition tasks: age-related increases in efficiency of scanning during inspection, and age-related increases in the ability to make decisions systematically during test. Critical details necessary for recognition were highlighted as…

To investigate the attributional processes mediating between outcome and expectancies and persistence, children's expectancies, attributions and response latency were measured. Children, equally divided into three age groups (three-five, six-eight, nine-twelve) were shown figures to match and were provided with experimentally controlled feedback…

This paper reports an experiment designed to test theoretical relations among fast problem solving, more complex and slower problem solving, and research concerning fundamental memory processes. Using a cathode ray tube, subjects were presented with propositions of the form "Y is in list X" which they memorized. In later testing they were asked to…

To determine whether gifted children are faster than average students on all behaviors sampled or only on academic subjects, 46 gifted and 30 average children were tested. The time rates for tapping, walking, reading, answering, and calculating were determined. All children were from grades 4 through 6; median IQ of the gifted was 138, and for the…

As a situational precursor of embarrassment, this study required college freshmen to answer either innocuous or body image questions asked by an opposite sex confederate, who was gazing directly into their eyes. College freshmen were chosen because they are in the process of assimilating physical changes and new roles apart from the familiar…

Undergraduates learned to read words spelled with novel letters under phonics or whole-word conditions through several overlearning trials, and vocalization latency of word recognition responses was measured. Whole-word instruction resulted in word recognition mechanisms similar to fully automated mechanisms, but phonics instruction did not.…

Good and poor readers' visual and auditory memory were tested. No group differences existed for single mode presentation in recognition frequency or latency. With multimodal presentation, good readers had faster latencies. Dual coding and self-terminating memory search hypotheses were supported. Implications for the reading process and reading…

Two experiments used the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results demonstrated that task-specific variables could be the primary determinants of how subjects verify…

In a modification of the sentence-picture comprehension task (Chase & Clark, 1972), 70 university undergraduates verified sentence-picture pairs. The findings limit the generalizability of any linguistic comparison model; two different comprehension strategies were used consistently by different subjects, whose choices of strategy were predictable…

An experiment is described that involved presenting sentences to the subject for study and then testing single words for recognition (the subject had to decide whether the test word was in one of the study sentences). A large priming effect was obtained. (Author/RM)

Two experiments are described in which reaction times for understanding target sentences or phrases in terms of a preceding context were measured. It is argued that both experiments can be accounted for in terms of contextually generated expectations. (Author/RM)

A factor analysis was used to study the relationships among response time and accuracy scores for a verbal analogies test, as well as a number of experimental variables designed to measure a series of information processing stages of the analogies task. (CTM)