According to J. Piaget, the child continually constructs or refines previous constructions in defining reality. Taking Piaget's lead, a study attempted to describe how children construct reality, with particular emphasis on the role of television in that construction. Four young children were observed and audio taped in viewing situations in their…

This technical report contains papers prepared by the 11 speakers at the 1980 Lake Wilderness (Seattle, Washington) Conference on Attention. The papers are divided into general models, physiological evidence, and visual attention categories. Topics of the papers include the following: (1) willed versus automatic control of behavior; (2) multiple…

The relationship between pre-cognition and creativity was investigated in an effort to reaffirm previous findings (Costello 1977) of a correlation between these variables. A sample of 100 engineering freshmen was tested for creativity using the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking and was tested for pre-cognitive ability using the Dean-Mihalasky…

Individuals interacting with an unfamiliar target person behave according to prior impressions of the target. A perceiver's pre-interaction expectancy can mediate both his and the target person's behavior, resulting in behavioral confirmation or compensation. Male subjects (N=96) participated in dyadic interactions in which one subject (perceiver)…

This paper explores various aspects of voting behavior among nearly 900 British Columbia voters in the 1979 Canadian federal election. Specifically, the paper examines the aggregate significance of strategic choice in a voting situation and identifies factors which increase or decrease an individual's disposition to act strategically. Strategic…

The theoretical framework for investigating human planning behavior and the procedures, results, and implications of two experiments involving planning in the domain of software design are presented in this report. A plan is defined as a hierarchical structure that underlies the solution to a problem; planning is the process of constructing this…

This research is concerned with human problem-solving behavior that involves inductive reasoning or concept formation when that behavior is being assisted by certain computer and display aids (called symbol manipulation functions). Human subjects use a variety of systematic operations when they are solving such problems. In order to analyze…

This report describes the experimental studies conducted to examine the role of mental structures in four different areas of research. The first area involves the structural analysis of isolable subsystems involved in visual and auditory pattern recognition. The second area involves the study of the encoding and retrieval of emotional or…

This research focuses on the effect of verbal behavior on the conditioning and extinction of an autonomic response, namely, the galvanic skin response (GSR). The major assumption is that the experimentor's verbal behavior produces verbal behavior internal to the subject, and this, in turn has a modifying effect on the conditioning phenomena. The…

These proceedings emphasize multidisciplineary theory and research having implications for behavioral science and/or education. The contributions deal with one or more of the following questions: (1) How can one characterize the knowledge structures which underlie behavior associated with subject matter disciplines such as mathematics and…

This study is part of a program designed to attempt identification of dissonance through components of electrophysiological instrumentation, for measuring and presenting to a person some of his own unconscious dissonance, of which he is normally unaware. Using college students as subjects, the authors used attitude ratings on values to attempt to…

The author reviews and evaluates the principal theoretical measures of attention categorized in three areas: self-report measures, operant behavioral measures, and psychophysiological measures. Self-report measures include a variety of rating scales, interest and attitude scales, Krugman's "number of 'connections,'" and program audience analyzers.…

This study attempted to answer the following three questions: 1) Do students of grades four through seven perform equally well on both syncretistic understanding and logical thinking? 2) Do boys perform as well as girls on these two types of thinking? 3) Do students whose parents have a higher educational level perform as well as students whose…

The purpose of this research was to explore the development of, and relationships among, individual modes of (1) articulating knowledge about and evaluation of peers; (2) attributing causality for interpersonal events to the self and to others; (3) attributing one's own and other's behavior to intentionality or accident. Data was collected for…

Eventually, as the research on any one topic advances in technical sophistication, it may well become more and more trivial until finally it fades away, while researchers once again wait for the appearance of a nova. (Author)