THE WORK OUTPUT OF RETARDED READERS USING A PROGRAMED LITERACY CURRICULUM WAS OBSERVED UNDER VARIOUS CONDITIONS OF REINFORCEMENT IN A CONTROLLED CLASSROOM. TASK BEHAVIOR WAS FOLLOWED BY CONDITIONS OF NO CONSEQUENCE, TEACHER PRAISE, A WORK-BREAK CONSEQUENCE, A MONETARY CONSEQUENCE, AND FEEDBACK ON AMOUNT OF WORK RELATIVE TO PREVIOUS WORK. SIX…

RESEARCH LITERATURE ON ATTENTION WAS REVIEWED, APPROACHES TO THE MEASUREMENT OF ATTENTION IN A CLASSROOM SETTING WERE STUDIED, AND CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTS IN WHICH ATTENTION WOULD BE STUDIED AS A DEPENDENT OR INDEPENDENT VARIABLE WERE DESIGNED. THE RESEARCH LITERATURE INDICATES THAT NOVELTY, VARIETY, CHANGE, AND COMPLEXITY ARE VARIABLES RELATED TO…

Studies investigating selected aspects of children's television viewing are described and the findings are used as the basis of a theoretical formulation in which young children's television viewing is seen as a transactional process similar to other normal information processing activities. According to this formulation, the child's motivation to…

Two studies were performed to evaluate the extent to which response patterns and sustained attentiveness is a function of the demands of a secondary task, primary task difficulty, and feedback arrangements. The first study varied primary task stimulus difficulty level, feedback arrangements on the primary task, and presence of the secondary task.…

The prediction that utilization of contextual information will be reduced by the presentation of secondary tasks requiring attention was studied. The importance of a limited-capacity operational memory for reading performance was discussed. (BJG)

This study was designed to identify the general level of cognitive processing that is especially vulnerable to distraction in schizophrenia. Attempts to determine at what level auditory distraction interferes with schizophrenics' performance, as opposed to normals, on simple recall tasks. (Editor/RK)

Research by Posner and Mitchell (1967) was used to investigate levels of noise processing in testing subjects' ability to "gate out" the processing of irrelevant and unwanted material. Three experiments are reported in which subjects had to judge whether two letters were the "same" or "different". Noise elements were included to test attention…

Explores the association between the relatively passive, sitting meditation and absorption and anxiety using a cross-sectional design. (Author/RK)

The relationship between physiological response patterns and mental competence was investigated by evaluating heart rate and respiratory responses during a sustained visual-search task in 29 nonretarded grade school children and 16 retarded adolescents. (Author)

The short-term reliability and long-term stability of visual habituation and dishabituation in infancy were assessed in a sample of 186 infants from four age groups (3-, 4-, 7- and 9-month-olds) seen for two within-age sessions, and in a sample of 69 infants seen longitudinally at 3, 4, 7, and 9 months of age. (Author/BN)

Comparison of 30 learning disabled (LD) children, ages 7 to 13, and controls on a computerized test of attentional skills indicated LD subjects committed more omission errors and responded at a slower rate but did not differ from the controls on commission errors, suggesting inefficient allocation of processing resources rather than attentional…

The study utilized a withdrawal (ABAB) design to analyze the effects of a self-recording procedure on attending to task behavior and academic productivity of two adolescents with multiple handicaps (mental retardation and schizophrenia). Results strongly suggest that this procedure may increase both attending to task behavior and academic…