The relationship between general intelligence and the ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli appearing in the same visual field as an attended target was studied for 167 college students. Results indicate that psychometric intelligence does not tap visual focused attention. (SLD)

The study, with 32 adolescents with mild mental retardation and controls, found that imagery practice facilitated the execution of the reaction time component of a motor task and sometimes facilitated performance of the movement time component of the motor task. (DB)

Developed Death Anxiety Scale for Children (DASC), instrument to explore children's responses to death and dying. Constructed scale of neutral and anxiety producing words. Established validity by reading words to children and recording galvanic skin response, response time, and pulse rate. Found that children responded with greater skin resistance…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) of children and adults were measured while subjects observed pictures of facial expressions. Adults had greater ERP responses to happy than to angry faces, whereas children had greater ERP responses to angry than to happy faces. (BC)

In 2 studies with 85 and 88 undergraduates, respectively, peripheral nerve conduction velocity (NCV) was significantly correlated with IQ score and reaction times, and NCV and reaction time contributed significantly, in combination, to prediction of IQ. Results are interpreted in terms of a neural efficiency model of intelligence. (Author/SLD)

Thirteen university students listened to synthesized vowels, presented 14 times randomly, and uttered each of the vowels as soon as they heard it. Serial analysis of successive auditory-vocal reaction times (AVRTs) revealed significant intrasession and intersession decreases in AVRTs in the majority of subjects. AVRT increases were also seen but…

Tested infants' latency in turning toward stimulus patterns and the duration of their initial fixation. Results showed that "turning latency" fell in a linear manner from 36 to 120 weeks after conception. Fixation time fell abruptly at 53 weeks. Preterm and full-term infants showed the same developmental trends. (BC)

Investigates and compares the real-time language-processing abilities of language-impaired and normal children using a work recognition reaction time paradigm. Results showed that the language-impaired children used linguistic context to facilitate work recognition but were slower to do so than their normally developing peers. (38 references) (GLR)

Investigation of grammaticality judgments and decision times for 21 children in 2 age groups (ages 6-7 and ages 8-9) found good sensitivity to grammatical errors, with errors in word order more readily detected than errors of morphological selection. Older children processed errors somewhat more quickly. (Author/DB)

Previous studies have suggested that correlations between reaction time (RT) and intelligence (IQ) may have resulted from confounding interactions between stimulus uncertainty and visual angle. Three experiments that were designed to remove the confound were carried out with 118 college students. These experiments indicate that previously reported…

Examined distractibility during visual fixations in 6- to 24-month-olds. Found that latency to turn toward a distractor was a function of length of look before distractor onset. Immediately before onset, children had greater sustained lowered heart rate for trials on which they continued looking at television monitor than for trials on which they…

Investigated whether individual and developmental differences in look duration were correlated with latency to disengage fixation from a visual stimulus for 3- and 4-month olds. Found that look duration was correlated with disengagement latency. Three-month olds showed slower latencies than 4-month olds. Long-looking infants showed greater…

Examined development of inhibitory control using a stop-signal procedure with subjects ages 6 to 81 years. Found that the speed of stopping becomes faster with increasing age throughout childhood, with limited evidence of slowing across adulthood. The go-signal reaction time clearly increased through childhood and slowed markedly through…

Four pigeons were exposed to two tandem variable-interval differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate schedules under different stimulus conditions. The values of the tandem schedules were adjusted so that reinforcement rates in one stimulus condition were higher than those in the other, even though response rates in the two conditions were nearly…

Derived equivalence relations, it has been argued, provide a behavioral model of semantic or symbolic meaning in natural language, and thus equivalence relations should possess properties that are typically associated with semantic relations. The present study sought to test this basic postulate using semantic priming. Across three experiments,…