Results of a study of 38 preschool children observed and videotaped during performance on a jigsaw-puzzle task indicate that puzzle solutions accompanied by a high rate of verbalizations were judged as more proficient, solved with a high rate of puzzle-solving moves, and completed in a shorter period of time. (Author/RH)

Twenty-five one-year-olds were administered two tasks (each of which consisted of a familiarization stage followed by a recognition stage) in order to determine whether infants can recognize the shapes of objects by touch alone. (CM)

When older siblings were present with infants and their mothers in the backyard of a private home, the infants went further from their mothers, traversed a larger area of the yard, left their mothers more quickly, and stayed away longer. (RH)

Presents new ideas for using buttons, beans, and beads as teaching manipulatives for elementary school children. The ideas include a button scavenger hunt, a button count, a cup puppet bean game, a numbers guessing game with beans in jars, and a bead stringing activity. (SM)

Presents two primary-level peer tutoring field studies and suggests ways to implement peer tutoring in a classroom. Lesson planning, students' journal writing, manipulative activities, and students' responses are discussed. Among the benefits of peer tutoring are enhanced self-esteem, enhanced sense of responsibility, improvement of skills,…

The authors used state-trace methodology to investigate whether a single dimension (e.g., strength) is sufficient to account for recall and judgments of learning (JOLs) or whether multiple dimensions (e.g., intrinsic and extrinsic factors) are needed. The authors separately manipulated the independent variables of intrinsic and extrinsic cues,…

Previous studies on ball catching have had the limitation that the catcher was restricted to lateral hand movements. The authors investigated catching behavior in the more natural situation in which hand movements were unconstrained. Movements of the hand were tracked as participants tried to "catch" an approaching ball simulated with changing…

The primary purpose of the present study was to determine whether recent findings documenting the benefits of text-related motor activity on young children's memory for reading passages [Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young readers' reading…

Using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm with the boundary placed after word n, the experiment manipulated preview of word n + 2 for fixations on word n. There was no preview benefit for 1st-pass reading on word n + 2, replicating the results of K. Rayner, B. J. Juhasz, and S. J. Brown (2007), but there was a preview benefit on the 3-letter…

This study investigated the role that visual tracking plays in coupling rhythmic limb movements to an environmental rhythm. Two experiments were conducted in which participants swung a hand-held pendulum while tracking an oscillating stimulus or while keeping their eyes fixed on a stationary location directly above an oscillating stimulus. It…

Two experiments investigated 5-month-old infants' amodal sensitivity to numerical correspondences between sets of objects presented in the tactile and visual modes. A classical cross-modal transfer task from touch to vision was adopted. Infants were first tactually familiarized with two or three different objects presented one by one in their…

The authors investigated the role of perceptual attunement in an emergency braking task in which participants waited until the last possible moment to slam on the brakes. Effects of the size of the approached object and initial speed on the initiation of braking were used to identify the optical variables on which participants relied at various…

In contextual cueing, the position of a target within a group of distractors is learned over repeated exposure to a display with reference to a few nearby items rather than to the global pattern created by the elements. The authors contrasted the role of global and local contexts for contextual cueing in naturalistic scenes. Experiment 1 showed…