Does a drawing embody the form and focus of what the artist actually sees, or instead, is it only after seeing the finished drawing that the artist knows the true meaning of his or her visual experience? It is the knowledge of the visual experience that drives the representation of it. Knowledge of the visual experience is present in varying…

A developmental study investigated the pictorial and linguistic main idea identification skills of 104 students in second, fifth, and eighth grades. In the pictorial task, the subjects studied a complete picture story and ranked the effectiveness of four separate main idea alternatives at capturing the meaning of the story. Following the same…

Cognitive processes, particularly in regard to negative content schemata, seem to play an instrumental role in the development and maintenance of depression. In order to better understand the nature of negative schemata in depressed individuals, both depressed and nondepressed subjects participated in two studies in which they were required to…

This paper presents preliminary results of research founded on the hypothesis that in real environments there exist regularities that can be idealized as mathematical structures that are simple enough to be analyzed. The author considered three steps in analyzing the encoding of modularity of the environment. First, a general information…

A new interactive model of attention, perception, memory, and arousal is introduced; and its use in assessing characteristics of the perceptual process is demonstrated. The principal concern is not the presentation of new data; rather it is placement of existing psychological data within a new context. Topics discussed include: attention as an…

The empirical study of knowledge representation is the focus of this paper, which observes that language as the cognitive instrument in the communication of phenomena must be capable of expressing relations of the observer-observation kind. The paper points out that this implies a coopeartive process at work in the production of a text, of which…

Fundamental to any critical reading process is the ability of the child to recognize and identify assumptions concerning the world in which he or she lives and brings to the printed page. The unconscious and implicit understandings that a reader and an author hold can fill the slots of developing schemata and become embedded and subsumed in…

This report relates current attentional research and theory to the development of skilled performance, with emphasis on how performance changes with practice. Dual process attention theory is reviewed, and the distinction between automatic and controlled processing is examined. The changing interactions between automatic and controlled processing…

College undergraduates (n=44) were given a measure of field independence-dependence prior to receiving instruction in conditional reasoning. Instruction incorporated various aspects of an earlier effective instructional system that was adapted for present learners and was incorporated into a larger, more typical classroom group. Results indicated…

A study was conducted to test the findings of two earlier studies (Peeck l974 and Pressley l983) on the effects of occasional mismatches between verbal and pictorial content in children's retention of illustrated prose. While the Peeck study indicated a considerable impact of mismatched pictures, the Pressley study indicated that with some…

Anglo, Black, and Mexican-American children were tested with the Portable Rod and Frame Test; the results showed that Black and Mexican-American children, and females in all three groups, scored in a significantly more field-dependent direction than Anglo children. (Author/JM)

A reliable, easily administered performance test of selective attentional ability was sought. A monaural listening task provided a baseline control for adequate hearing and memory; a dichotic listening task then provided indices of ability to focus attention and resist distraction while a simultaneous listening task provided measures of ability to…

The main objective of the research was to define and dimensionalize the self concept. In a theoretical approach similar to the debates on the meaning of intelligence, this study attempted to determine whether the self concept is a general factor which explains more specific selves, whether it connotes a hierarchical structure, or whether it is…

Gestalt Therapy is in a growth crisis. In practice, there is an abundance of inadequate practitioners and trainers of Gestalt Therapy. In the literature, there is an abundance of introductory works, a paucity of advanced texts, and a misunderstanding and inadequate representation of Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt Therapy training is confused by unclear…

Noting that the equipment traditionally used in eye movement research is both expensive and stationary in nature, this report describes apparatus for collecting and interpreting eye movement data that is both relatively inexpensive and portable. The report lists and describes hardware and software components of a data collection and data analysis…