This article focuses on a small experiment initiated by two three-year-old preschool children without the instruction or supervision of a teacher, while playing in the yard. During their playtime, they began to color the blacktop with chalk. They thought of a brilliant idea of pouring water over the chalk drawings and after the water dries up,…

Preschoolers' reasons for ranking the beauty of 30 children's book illustrations were investigated through individual interviews. Most frequent response criteria for beauty were associated with familiar objects or surroundings, action, color, clothing or accessories, water or ice, body features, and babies or small things. Children's book…

Generation enhances memory for occurrence but may not enhance other aspects of memory. The present study further delineates the negative generation effect in context memory reported in N. W. Mulligan (2004). First, the negative generation effect occurred for perceptual attributes of the target item (its color and font) but not for extratarget…

Meaningful visual experience requires computations that identify objects as the same persisting individuals over time, motion, occlusion, and featural change. This article explores these computations in the tunnel effect: When an object moves behind an occluder, and then an object later emerges following a consistent trajectory, observers…

People usually talk about "hot and cold" colours without really thinking of the impact these definitions may have on scientific understanding. These colours are associated with the human sensations of hot and cold, and this idea is consistent with commonsense and daily experience. Interacting with students, we detect conceptual conflicts when they…

Two experiments explored the behavior of 20 Asian elephants ("Elephas aximus") in simultaneous visual discrimination tasks. In Experiment 1, 7 Burmese logging elephants acquired a white+/black- discrimination, reaching criterion in a mean of 2.6 sessions and 117 discrete trials, whereas 4 elephants acquired a black+/white- discrimination in 5.3…

Experiment 1 investigated the controlling properties of variability contingencies on choice between repeated and variable responding. Pigeons were exposed to concurrent-chains schedules with two alternatives. In the REPEAT alternative, reinforcers in the terminal link depended on a single sequence of four responses. In the VARY alternative, a…

Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of…

This study was undertaken to examine the impact of different color women's business suits on hiring decisions and perceptions of job applicants for two different types of jobs, one requiring warmth (elementary school teacher) and one requiring power (police officer). It was hypothesized that fictitious job applicants wearing dark, cold colors…

This book presents over 400 illustrations of complex data that show how the dimensionality and density of portrayals can be enhanced. Practical advice on how to explain complex materials by visual means is given, and examples illustrate the fundamental principles of information display. Design strategies presented are exemplified in maps, the…

Describes an International Reading Association award-winning dissertation which examines the use of color cues in facilitating the learning of basic reading skills. (RB)

A research paper which questions whether watching color television at home affect the way children respond to the presence or absence of color in presentations at school. (Author/HB)

For each work assignment, photojournalists must decide whether to use black-and-white or color film and how to frame the picture. These decisions are considered crucial, yet little is known about how the presence of color and design complexity affect how people process the information in photographs. A study tested whether color and design…

Prior to 1961, the cost and inflexibility of colorcasting commercials and the limited number of color television sets in the United States had deterred advertisers from switching to color commercials. From 1961 to 1967, however, color's popularity grew significantly. It was hypothesized that, because research on television color effectiveness…

A study investigated the importance adults assign to various techniques used in the design and production of print educational material. Subjects, 103 adults who regularly receive printed educational information and professionals engaged in the production of such information, completed a survey including demographic information, time spent in…