Superior performance by adventitiously blind Ss relative to congenitally blind Ss appeared on tasks where the stimuli were complex, familiar and/or apprehenced with arm's length of the body, but not on tasks where the stimuli were relatively simple, novel, and/or apprehenced only through locomotion. (Author/MC)

The study investigated whether children assigned to classes for severe oral language handicaps in California by a multidisciplinary diagnostic team exhibit a characteristic Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities performance profile or a number of distinct profiles. (Author)

Resistance applied to activities of rocking, creeping, and walking as a means to increase visual attention of students who are easily distracted is described. The resistance activities are said to result in improvement of gross motor coordination, oculomotor control, memory processes, and untimately, greater efficiency in academic learning. (CL)

Three experiments examined whether newborns are sensitive to an operant-conditioning task involving unprepared relation between a response and a stimuli. Found that newborns tested under the High-Amplitude Sucking procedure were involved in an operant-learning situation, in that an increase in sucking rates could be obtained after an auditory…

Introduces consumer affairs specialists to engineering psychology, a relatively new academic field that brings perspectives of psychology to the design of various consumer products. (Author)

Examined in 4 experiments 2-year-olds' knowledge of solidity in search tasks. Found no evidence that 2-year-olds represented solidity and support constraints on trajectories of falling objects; two experiments included 2.5-year-olds who succeeded on search tasks. Explored implications of 2-year-olds' poor performance in light of very young…

Broca's region in the dominant cerebral hemisphere is known to mediate the production of language but also contributes to comprehension. This region evolved only in humans and is constituted of Brodmann's areas 44 and 45 in the inferior frontal gyrus. There is, however, evidence that Broca's region overlaps, at least in part, with the ventral…

Classification "rules" in expert and everyday discourse are usually deficient by formal standards, lacking explicit decision procedures and precise terms. The authors argue that a central function of such weak rules is to focus on perceptual learning rather than to provide definitions. In 5 experiments, transfer following learning of family…

Perceptual motor programs (PMPs) are used widely in Australian schools. This study reports on an analysis of the information about the uses and the rationales for these programs drawn from the websites of Australian schools. Wide-ranging claims are made for the benefits of these programs for students with difficulties and for typically developing…

This paper interrogates the role children's indigenous games of Africa can play in the development of fundamental movement skills relevant in modernized sports. On a daily basis, children in Africa play varieties of traditional games that vary between tribes, communities and distances. However, the efficacy of these games in the development of…

Infants' exploration of their environment has been considered by Piaget and others to provide a vehicle for cognitive development. Little research, however, has examined in detail what infants actually do while exploring or how exploratory behavior is related to other aspects of cognitive functioning. The present investigation was designed to…

The booklet explores the role of sensory experiences in the severely developmentally disabled child. Developmental theory is addressed, followed by specific activity suggestions (broken down into developmental levels) for developing tactile sense, auditory sense, gustatory (taste) sense, olfactory sense, visual sense, and kinesthetic sense.…

This study was designed to determine whether modifying the task characteristics of the Stage 6 sensorimotor means-end problem (by introducing additional visual cues) aided task solution in children. Subjects were 80 children, ages 20-33 months. (CS)

Transfer of learning in the acquisition of motor skills, centered around proactive and retroactive experimental designs, is discussed. The structures of the two designs are explained and compared. The effect upon transfer of learning by both stimulus and response gradients is examined. Phenomena contributing to negative transfer are investigated,…

This study was concerned with--(1) the conditions of transfer of training, (2) armed forces research on the use of synthetic training devices in the learning of complex skills, (3) armed forces research on the use of training devices in learning judgmental skills, and (4) training devices used in driver education. A section with a summary,…