The paper presents a theoretical framework addressing three aspects of embodied pedagogical agents: visual static appearance, pedagogical role, and communicative style. The framework is then applied to a user study where 90 school children (aged 12-15) in a dummy multimedia program were presented with either an instructor or a learning companion…

The article presents a model of an effectively implemented visual phonics intervention program for kindergarten children at high risk for reading failure in a general education classroom. There is a growing body of professional literature documenting the effectiveness of visual phonics for children who are hard-of-hearing or deaf. There is little…

A survey of images on gravestones yields a fascinating array of symbols and visual communication. This paper describes a project in which over 300 symbols in graveyards of the southeastern United States were examined. The method of recording the images and information about them was to photograph the symbol with a 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) and…

A study explored the phenomenon of space constancy or visual stability of stimulus patterns across saccades (a series of small jerky movements of the eye) by making changes in natural, full-color pictures during selected saccades as observers (18 members of the University of Illinois community) examined them for 20 seconds in preparation for a…

The ability to decide rapidly that two visual stimuli are nominally the same when they are also visually the same (the Posner effect) was examined for stimuli of increasing visual complexity (Experiment 1) and when a greater variety of visual differences between the two stimuli was employed (Experiment 2). (Editor)

In an evaluation of the relation between dimensional salience and preschoolers' judgments of bigness, 3-year-old children were shown triads of rectangles and asked to select the "big" one. The biggest rectangle in each triad was neither the tallest nor the widest. (JMB)

The relationship between neonatal visual information-processing and the burst-pause pattern of nonnutritive sucking was explored. (JMB)

Two experiments investigated the role of kindergarten and elementary school children's spontaneous cognitive sets in pictorial discrimination learning. Data indicated that, in comparison to the behavior of older children, the behavior of kindergarteners is governed more by the perceptible than by the conceptual attributes of stimuli. (GO)

A description of a media experiment in which the data indicate that film stimuli alone appears to be the significant variable. (Author/HB)

This study was conducted to demonstrate that a context-dependent discrimination can produce learning difficulty in a pseudo-spectrogram reading task and to look at what contribution segmentation makes to that difficulty. Experiment one involved 10 subjects recruited from the University of Pittsburgh, who were shown pseudo-spectrogram patterns and…

This study examined the development of smooth visual tracking in 11 infants 2 and 3 months of age, with particular attention given to the role of expectation in tracking complex visual motion. Data were gathered by recording the image of the infant's eye as he or she tracked a small computer-generated target as it moved in a sinusoidal trajectory…

To determine whether preschool children's memory for unfamiliar faces could be facilitated by giving them orienting information about faces, 4- and 5-year-old subjects were told that they were going to play a guessing game in which they would be looking at faces and guessing which ones they had seen before. In study 1, 6 boys and 6 girls within…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

This booklet was designed to aid parents in making things at home to develop their newborn to 2-year-old children's skills. Suggested are easy-to-make visual stimuli for infants up to 6 weeks of age and 6 weeks to 3 months of age. For the latter, tactile stimuli also are considered. For infants 3 to 6 months of age, objects providing visual,…