Discusses procedural schematics (how-to texts). Suggests activities to help students understand these documents. (RS)

Longitudinal findings concerning five male and five female infants suggest a number of age-related changes in the dominant mode of visual scanning. Changes involve attention to locations of stimulus contours and prominent features of the stimulus, accuracy of saccades, and reversion to scanning behaviors typical of younger ages under certain…

First, newborns' preferential looking between pairs of stimuli which varied in real size and viewing distance was solely determined by retinal size. Second, newborns desensitized to changes in distance and retinal size strongly preferred an object of a different size to the familiar one. (RH)

Criticizes an article in an earlier issue of this journal concerning Otto Neurath. Argues against the notion that Neurath was a communist and an agent of Soviet propaganda. Suggests that the previous article's dichotomy that graphic information is either hard science or pure art prevents an understanding of the subject. (RS)

Two experiments tested 10-month-old infants' categorization abilities. Infants were presented with a sequence of stimuli depicting members of a given category. Stimuli representing nonmembers of the category were inserted into the sequence. Infants appeared to disregard the nonmembers in the sequence. (MDM)

Two experiments used a visual habituation paradigm to examine infants' categorical discrimination of the medial stop consonants /aba/ and /apa/. Results provided evidence of infant categorical discrimination based solely on closure duration. Infants shifted their boundary toward shorter closure durations if they received pulsing during…

Shows how the scheme for understanding mimetic documents in previous columns can be used as a framework for understanding the levels of knowledge that make up John Anderson's "declarative stage." (RS)

In one experiment, infants were presented with their mother, a female stranger, and an object. In a second experiment, infants were presented with a female stranger and three objects with features that resembled an abstract, smiling face. In both experiments, infants smiled more to the person than to the objects. (BC)

Describes pictures--visual mimetic documents which show the denotative and connotative features of some object, state, or event. Presents instructional activities which use pictures. (RS)

Pigeons were trained on many-to-one matching in which pairs of samples, each consisting of a visual stimulus and a distinctive pattern of center-key responding, occasioned the same reinforced comparison choice. Acquired equivalence between the visual and response samples then was evaluated by reinforcing new comparison choices to one set of…

A striking finding about human memory is that people's level of accuracy in remembering the orientation of heads on coins is often not simply at the chance level but significantly below it. However, S. W. Kelly, A. M. Burton, T. Kato, and S. Akamatsu (2001) reported that this is not so when two-alternative forced-choice visual recognition is…

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the extent to which objects that are about to be named are processed prior to fixation. Participants named pairs or triplets of objects. One of the objects, initially seen extrafoveally (the interloper), was replaced by a different object (the target) during the saccade toward it. The interloper-target…

Two experiments are reported using a visual familiarization categorization procedure. In both experiments, infants were familiarized with sets of stimuli previously shown to contain asymmetric feature distributions that support an asymmetry in young infants' categorization of cats and dogs (i.e. infants' cat category excludes dogs but their dog…

The purpose of this study was to analyze fear extinction and reinstatement in humans using fear-potentiated startle. Participants were fear conditioned using a simple discrimination procedure with colored lights as the conditioned stimuli (CSs) and an airblast to the throat as the unconditioned stimulus (US). Participants were extinguished 24 h…

It is well documented that people are less interested in studying plants than animals. We tested whether university students would selectively recall more animal images than plant images even when equally-nameable plant and animal images were presented for equal lengths of time. Animal and plant images were pre-tested and 14 animal-plant pairs…