Tested visual-perceptual, attentional, and visual-motor skills of 16 school-age children who had been born pre-term and "healthy," and 16 who had been born full-term. Found that compared to subjects born full-term, pre-term subjects performed well on most visual perception tasks, but less well on visual search and visual-motor tasks.…

Investigated relationship between critical flicker fusion (CFF) thresholds and five personality characteristics (alienation; social nonconformity; discomfort, expression, and defensiveness) under three auditory stimulus conditions (quiet, noise, meaningful verbal stimuli). Results from 60 college students revealed that auditory stimulation and…

States that 46 children aged 12-16 were shown a page of meaningless text covered with plastic overlays, including 7 that were various colors and 1 that was clear. Explains that each child selected the overlay that made reading easiest. Notes that children who read with a colored overlay complained of visual discomfort when they read without the…

The mental capacity of 120 children aged 10 to 16 years was measured with 2 visual information-processing tasks, and their level of moral development was assessed with the Sociomoral Reflection Measure. Results suggest that mental capacity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for moral developmental growth. (LB)

Children either saw, were told about, or felt the contents of a toy tunnel. They were asked what was in the tunnel and how they knew the contents. Three year olds had difficulty identifying the sources of their knowledge. Questions that involved inference proved to be especially difficult for them. (BC)

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a…

Neurologically normal individuals exhibit strong leftward response biases during free-viewing perceptual judgments of brightness, quantity, and size. When participants view two mirror-reversed objects and they are forced to choose which object appears darker, more numerous, or larger, the stimulus with the relevant feature on the left side is…

In some contexts, a photograph may be worth a thousand words. Previous research revealed a dialectical character of photographs: they simultaneously lack determinacy and exhibit an excess of meaning. The purpose of this study was to understand how, under this condition, high school students interpret photographs that were accompanied by different…

Several studies have reported that individuals with autism and Asperger's syndrome show a local processing bias on tasks involving features and configurations. This study assessed whether this bias results from differences in the perception of features or a cognitive bias to attend to features in autism as a consequence of a deficit in attending…

The marks awarded to 130 second year undergraduate word processed essays were assessed in relation to their use of different typographic features. By and large most of these features had little effect on the essay grades. However, essays printed in 12-point type gained significantly higher marks (mean = 56.8) than essays printed in 10-point type…

Absolute auditory thresholds, frequency resolution and temporal resolution develop with age. It is still discussed whether low-level auditory performance is of clinical significance--specifically, for delayed maturation of central auditory processing. Recently, five new auditory tasks were used to study the development of low-level auditory…

The case-based computerized laboratory (CCL) is a chemistry learning environment that integrates computerized experiments with emphasis on scientific inquiry and comprehension of case studies. The research objective was to investigate chemical understanding and graphing skills of high school honors students via bidirectional visual and textual…

This study was designed to determine whether children 3, 4, and 5 years of age could demonstrate their metaphorical competence equally well in words and in pictures. Previous studies which have investigated young children's metaphorical ability have often encouraged young children to make judgments of similarity which rely almost exclusively on…

The Meta-Contrast Technique (MCT) was used for a differential diagnosis of anxiety-ridden children aged 4-16 years. Signs of open fright in the test situation showed the greatest correlation with symptoms of paroxysmal anxiety (in older children). Other severe signs of anxiety were fusion between the hero and the threat, leaking defense…

Research on the cognitive components of academic achievement subjected White South African schoolchildren to several visual perception tests. Results indicated an association between measures of visual perception and tests of reading and arithmetic performance. Cognitive complexity emerged as an important differentiating feature of perceptual…