One hundred twenty kindergarten, second, third and combined fifth and sixth grade children were asked to cross out the letter "e" while silently reading appropriate prose passages. The children's ability was dependent upon grade level and whether the "e" was silent, pronounced, or in the word "the". (BD)

This study examined effects of social praise on attentive behavior of reinforced and nonreinforced children. Two pairs of mentally retarded preschool boys served as subjects. Results revealed that intervention procedure increased the attentive behavior of the target subjects and nonreinforced subjects also increased their attentive behavior during…

The ten finalists for the Council for Advancement and Support of Education's annual Professor of the Year award discuss how they keep from being bored and boring in their instruction despite teaching the same subject matter each year, and how they maintain the enthusiasm they had on entering the profession. (MSE)

Results suggest that infants' errors in searching for a visible object reflect lapses of attention rather than systematic misunderstandings of objects or space and so are not incompatible with an information-processing account of early search. (Author/RH)

Art activities can be helpful in promoting eye-hand coordination, stimulating language development, facilitating attending skills, and allowing exceptional students to express themselves. (CL)

To evaluate individual differences in children's propensity to demonstrate cognitive synthesis, six-year-olds were asked to demonstrate the meaning of various sentences constructed of logographs, which were arranged in either a meaningful or scrambled order. Overall, synthesizers had a larger attentional reserve, or M-capacity, than…

This paper is concerned with the unfolding of human marks, beginning with scribbling, and their contribution to developing literacy. The paper argues that children's scribbles reveal a neural substrate destined for marks and influence that substrate significantly, cuing what is distinctly human in linguistic behavior and consciousness, or symbolic…

The results suggest that through meditation practice the individual may learn how to concentrate and to volitionally alter his feeling state by shifting his attention. (Author)

The author indicates a number of methodological differences between his experiments and the unsuccessful replication by Forster and Grierson. He also suggests that these problems are complicated by an unnecessarily narrow interpretation of the attentional selectivity hypothesis. Forster and Grierson's study and rejoinder appear in this journal…

The development of capacity for attention was assessed by giving children 5, 8, 9, and 12 years of age a component-selection task with instructions to attend to one component or another, or with no specific instructions regarding the stimuli. (CM)

The hypothesis was tested that low self-esteem people are more "self-conscious," which impairs their task performance. High and low self-esteem subjects performed a concept formation task under conditions designed to focus the subject's attention on himself or on the task. Results paralleled findings on test anxiety. (SJL)

Two potential strategies for coping with stress are "situation redefinition" (i.e., reappraising a stressful situation as nonstressful) and "attentional diversion" (i.e., focusing attention on a neutral or pleasant stimulus rather than on a stressful stimulus). Although these strategies have been discussed frequently by personality theorists,…

Examined performance on ventromedial prefrontal tasks of preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), preschoolers with developmental delays, and typically- developing 12- to 46-month-olds, matched on mental age. Found that children with ASD performed similarly to comparison groups on all executive function tasks. Ventromedial, but not…

Abilities of individuals (n=42), either with or without mental retardation, to search for and detect changes to naturalistic scenes were investigated. Individuals with mental retardation required more time to detect changes, especially changes of marginal interest. Eye-tracking analysis of six participants suggested that individuals with mental…