The focus of the present study was to examine covert orienting responses to peripheral flash cues among children with autism in a situation where attentional processes were taxed by the presence of distractors in the visual field. Fourteen children with autism (MA = 6-7 years) were compared to their MA-matched peers without autism on a forced…

Using a lexical-decision task performed by Dutch-English bilinguals, the author showed that the recognition of visually presented first language (L1; e.g., touw) and second language (L2; e.g., back) targets is facilitated by L2 and L1 masked primes, respectively, which are pseudohomophones (roap and ruch) of the target's translation equivalent…

The enumeration of small numbers of objects (approximately 4) proceeds rapidly, accurately, and with little effort via a process termed subitization. Four experiments examined whether it was possible to subitize the number of features rather than objects present in a display. Overall, the findings showed that when features are presented randomly…

Reviews of the dyslexia literature often seem to suggest that children with dyslexia perform at a lower level on almost any task. Richards et al. (Dyslexia 2002; 8: 1-8) note the importance of being able to demonstrate dissociations between tasks. However, increasingly elegant experiments, in which dissociations are found, almost inevitably find…

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…

Using the Luck and Vogel change detection paradigm, we sought to investigate the capacity of visual working memory in 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds. We found that performance on the task improved significantly with age and also obtained evidence that the capacity of visual working memory approximately doubles between 5 and 10 years of age, where it…

The most popular activities from APA's successful "Activities Handbooks for the Teaching of Psychology" are gathered together and updated in this book of teachers' favorites. The lesson plans, which encourage active learning and involve the whole class, have stood the test of time and proven themselves to be entertaining, effective, and easy to…

The longitudinal interrelations among age, visual and auditory short-term memory, and the concrete operational tasks of class inclusion and combinatorial reasoning were investigated over four testing occasions in a sample of 134 students, initially ranging from 5 to 12 years in age. The Piagetian task battery involved placement of colored…

This paper contrasts classical Aristotelian narrative, which encouraged intellectual reflection and came to dominate Hollywood film by the 1930s, with the pulsating images which began to appear in the 1980 as a result of MTV's influence on films. The discussion focuses on two major Hollywood films: "Grapes of Wrath" (1940) and "Top…

Knowledge of the processes involved in visual and auditory perception, as well as basic understanding of the mechanisms employed by the human brain in transforming perceptions into cognitions are prerequisites for the study of television aesthetics. Numerous scientific studies now found in such diversified fields as perceptual psychology,…

G. Wolford's perturbation model of letter identification is designed to account for identification errors of briefly presented characters. Its chief assumptions are that features are extracted in parallel, that some of these features become perturbed or mislocalized, and that mislocalizations are more likely to occur in the direction of the fovea…

Concludes that further research into the imagery-comprehension relationship in reading is necessary. (RB)

Article evaluated the place of structuralism as a mode of literary criticism. (Author/RK)

The purpose of this paper is to describe a framework in which thinking skills instruction and other needed instructional emphases can be integrated into a unified whole. Discussion focuses on John Anderson's unitary model of cognition (1983), learning-to-learn, the nature of traditional curriculum content, thinking skills such as storage and…

A study investigated at what point during eye fixations visual information is used in furthering the reading process. The study identified two aspects of information processing: registration, in which a light pattern on the retina triggers a pattern of neural activity in the visula cortex; and utilization, in which the registered pattern has an…