The message we can get from McLuhan is to use the visual communication that conveys its own message, as in the case of advertising arts. (HOD)

Graphs, bars, charts, and diagrams have been used by designers, writers, and scientists to communicate. Now, research suggests that graphic organizers benefit teaching and learning. This article describes graphic organizers: sequential, conceptual, hierarchical, cyclical, Venn, fishbone or Ishikawa, squeeze and stretch, why-why, t-chart, KWL…

Summarizes state-of-the-art approaches for assessing visual stimulus same/different judgments in individuals with severe intellectual disabilities. Methodological investigations indicate that one can obtain reliable same/different judgments with a variety of stimuli in virtually anyone for whom a basal score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test…

Two studies examined 9- to 15-month-olds' ability to deduce an abstract nonmatching rule from reward feedback. Results showed that physical connectedness between stimuli and reward was key to performance. In the absence of the perception that stimulus and reward were components of a single thing, even close spatial and temporal proximity were…

Advances the idea that storyboarding, long associated with scriptwriting, advertising, and more recently with technical manuals, can be successfully applied to an even broader variety of technical documents. Applies storyboarding techniques to designing technical proposals to suggest methods of incorporating more visuals into documents, as well as…

Auto-photography and photo elicitation are techniques that can help teachers articulate often subconscious beliefs about teaching. In auto-photography, participants, not researchers, take the pictures. Photo elicitation uses photographs to stimulate the interviewing process. Issues include research collaboration, mutual visual context,…

The study investigated the effectiveness of using visual cues to highlight the seams of baseballs, to improve the hitting of curveballs by five undergraduate varsity baseball team candidates. Results indicated that subjects hit a greater percentage of marked than unmarked balls. (Author/DB)

Tests the point of convergence of linguistic information from auditory and visual channels. Compares reaction times for auditory and visual stimuli consisting of sentences, syntactic nonsense strings, random words, and nonwords. Finds that listening and reading processing converge at the word level and that words processed aurally and visually…

This study, involving 10 adults with dyslexia and 11 controls, found that controls differentiated between real and false traffic signs better than subjects did and that there was a significant correlation between traffic sign recognition and driving experience for controls but not for subjects. Results are interpreted in terms of a deficit in…

Studied 4- to 10-year-olds' familiarity judgments of peers. Found that, contrary to adults, external facial features were key. Also found that the switch to adult recognition pattern takes place after the ninth year. (ETB)

The perception of emotions from facial expression was studied with 68 schizotypal individuals and a control group (n=40). The results did not support the hypotheses that the schizotypal group would display more restricted similarity range in judging emotions, judge emotions as less pleasant, and display less accuracy in labelling emotions. (SW)

In three experiments, nine-month-old infants were trained to fixate on a particular feature in a pair of stimuli that varied along three dimensions. In a fourth experiment, infants were trained to fixate on a stimulus compound until reaching a learning criterion. Infants' discrimination learning under these conditions implied an ability to attend…

Two studies involving 177 undergraduates examined the effects that mental representations derived from maps and verbal descriptions have on the recall of facts from a text. Findings suggest that there may be fundamental differences between visual and verbal representations of the same space. (SLD)

In two experiments, preschool children and adults were asked to judge which way an equilateral triangle was pointing under several contextual conditions. Results indicated that children and adults attended to both global and local levels of a pattern. (BC)

Assessed infants' detection of relative motion between a target and its surrounding static reference features in two experiments. Found evidence for 8- and 20-week-olds' detection of a moving target, and a target and surrounding reference features moving in opposite directions. Twenty-week-olds detected a target that moved faster and in the same…