The sensitivity of 10 moderately mentally retarded and 10 nonretarded adults to changes in environmental spatial structure with and without visual-environmental clues was examined. Both groups showed similar sensitivity to perspective changes without visual cues, but only the nonretarded demonstrated increased accuracy with the visual cues.…

Four experiments investigated three- and four-year-old children's knowledge of projective size-distance and projective shape-orientation relationships. Results indicated that preschool children's understanding of these relationships seems at least partly cognitive rather than wholly perceptive, providing further evidence for the acquisition of…

The article describes a group motor-route activity to help mulitply handicapped blind students develop a complete understanding of spatial-movement concepts and to increase their cognitive motor skills. (Author/CL)

Sixteen intermediate level hearing-impaired students were examined on perceptions that still water remains invariantly horizontal regardless of container tilt. Similar to findings reported for older hearing-impaired students, Ss made more errors with the straight-sided than with the curve-sided containers. Males performed better than females on…

Fifteen aphasic and 15 normal adults demonstrated use of a right hemisphere visuospatial strategy to analyze printed whole words and word parts such as prefixes and suffixes. The performances of the two groups were similar, suggesting that the hypothesized strategy could be useful as a reading approach for aphasics. (Author/CL)

The models of standard test theory, having evolved under a trait-oriented psychology, do not reflect the knowledge structures and the problem-solving strategies now seen as central to understanding performance and learning. In some applications, however, key qualitative distinctions among persons as to structures and strategies can be expressed…

Concludes that children, as well as adults, are able to expand or contract the breadth of their attentional focus in accordance with task demands. Suggests there is a developmental change in the efficiency with which a stimulus presented in an otherwise empty field can be located. (Author/RH)

Infants 9 to 10 months of age were presented with a series of visible displacement hiding trials at two locations. Infants had to choose among three, five, or six alternative locations on each trial. Search attempts tended to cluster around the currently correct location during both trials on all apparati, providing evidence for a memory…

The author points out the problem learning disabled students have with the language of right and left. Reasons for inappropriate classroom interventions are pointed out, and guidelines for program implementation and activities for dealing with this problem are offered. (SW)

This study used a variation of Piaget and Inhelder's water level task and several cognitive complexity measures to test the predictions that cognitive complexity would relate positively to performance of the water level task and that males would perform better. The predictions were confirmed. Correlations for males and females differed.…

The structure of spatial representation in four congenitally and three adventitiously blind 11-year-old children was examined by means of pointing, mapping, drawing, and spatial reasoning on two simple routes over repeated trials. (Author)

Bengali, English, and Hindi-speaking children five to nine years old were asked to place an object in front of or behind objects with or without obvious fronts. All children responded on the basis of an inherent object cue when a fronted object was used. When a nonfronted object was used, all children treated it as a fronted object. (Author/MP)

Examines the effects of dimensionality and salience of frame of reference on children's location of a point in space. Subjects were eight boys and eight girls from each of first, second and third grades. (CM)

Presents some exercises for teaching perspective to high school art students. (SJL)