Purpose: The goal of this study was to provide guidance to clinicians on early benchmarks of successful word learning in an interactive book reading treatment and to examine how encoding and memory evolution during treatment contribute to word learning outcomes by kindergarten children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Twenty-seven…

Conflicting evidence has arisen from correlational studies regarding the role of executive control functions in Theory of Mind. The current study used dual-task manipulations of executive functions (inhibition, updating and switching) to investigate the role of these control functions in mental state and non-mental state tasks. The "Eyes"…

Two experiments were conducted to assess whether the distribution of fixation times might be related to the prevailing cognitive activity involved with two different tasks, i.e., driving and observing colored fields. The results suggest that the distribution of fixation times can be associated with the prevailing cognitive activity while viewing.…

Pictures are often used by cognitive psychologists to investigate the development of cognitive functions. Different attributes of the picture, such as object or picture familiarity, word frequency, and age of acquisition, are known to correlate with naming latency and to affect memory, particularly retrieval processes. But without the use of…

A novelty preference method was used to examine memory processes in retarded persons. Recognition memory as indexed by novel looking declined over the retention interval. Since memory is being inferred from response preferences which reflect an induced motivational state, satiation, the relationship between this state and memory must be…

The spread of encoding concept was tested visually by having subjects view pictures which varied in contour completeness. The hypothesis was supported that as contour completeness decreased, the amount of perceptual analysis and memory performance would increase. (Author/MH)

Picture naming in children was assessed as a function of two stimulus characteristics: the number of correct names for a picture and the degree to which a picture realistically represents the object. Two experiments showed that children named low-uncertainty objects faster than high-uncertainty objects with multiple correct names. Contains 50…

This study investigated the effects of color cues as well as the absence of such cues on the recognition of visual images using as subjects 28 college students in a basic communications course. The stimulus materials were slides in three categories: (1) original color (realistic), (2) black and white, and (3) non-realistic color format. Subjects…

The historical development and recent applications are described of the picture sequencing format (PSF), a testing device which requires the subject to designate a complete and correct order for a set of related pictures. The earliest use was by Decroly in 1914 and perhaps the best known use is in the Wechsler intelligence tests. Special…

This study assessed the effects of bizarreness, prompt modality, and prompt type for 144 five and eight year-old children on recognition memory of pictorial pairs. Presentation of stimuli was self-paced, allowing for the collection of study time and response latency data, as well as recording number correct. While both bizarre and nonbizarre forms…

This paper describes a study in which a Picture Readability Index (PRI) was used to investigate initial and extended perceptions of photographs. Readability criteria for evaluating instructional text seems to have been in place for a long time, yet instructional visuals like photographs and illustrations have typically been subject to no such…

The Preschool Embedded Figures Test (PEFT), based partly on the Children's Embedded Figures Test, is a measure of field independence, or analytic functioning. It is intended to investigate the development of psychological differentiation in children as young as age three. The PEFT contains 27 black and white drawings (3 practice drawings and 24…

The Picture Completion subtest of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence was included in this study as a measure of analytic functioning, an aspect of psychological differentiation. Twelve of the 23 items on the test were taken from the WISC and 11 were new. The child is shown a series of 23 pictures, each of which has some…