Three studies explore the development of discrimination and memory for symmetry in preschoolers four to six years of age. Issues addressed include the young child's ability to discriminate and reproduce symmetry, and the effects of pattern orientation and complexity on the young child's symmetry discrimination and reproduction. Results indicate…

Reports study on speed of response to printed letters, syllables, words, and word sequences in 150 children from kindergarten through grade 11. Tasks included visual matching to a visual sample, visual matching to an auditory sample, oral reading, and visual scanning tasks. (Author/SB)

Discusses the relationship between aesthetic value and the improvement of perception of visual artwork. Recent experiments have attempted to improve visual perception of school children, and to study their developmental preferences in art. But art has moral dimensions, and aesthetic education must also facilitate the appreciation of aesthetic…

Orthographic context and visual letter information were independently varied in a letter recognition task. The results contradicted the qualitative predictions of nonindependence theories of reading and are accurately described by a quantification of independence theory. (Author/CP)

Examines the perception of components of written and spoken codes of human communication from a broad perspective in an attempt to identify possible similarities. (GT)

This study examines how task characteristics (the number of visual chunks and the amount of planning time) and test-taker characteristics (graph familiarity) influence the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in graph comprehension, the strategies used in describing graphs, and the scores obtained on the graph description task in a…

Research on the analysis of time-series data has shown that decisions reached through visual analysis of the data may be influenced by the statistical parameters of those data. The current study investigated the statistical properties of curriculum-based time-series data for 68 elementary resource room students in four Minnesota school districts.…

The main purpose of this study was to investigate whether children's perceptual comprehension of symmetrical numerical displays was greater than their comprehension of asymmetrical numerical displays. Effects of sex, age and socioeconomic status were looked at. Seventy-three kindergarten and first grade children participated in the study.…

Described are three experiments which probed children's sensitivity to structure or organization in visual patterns. Each experiment employed a different paradigm (complexity judgment, discrimination learning, recognition learning, and memory) in order to tap different aspects of children's use of structural information. Subjects were children in…

Beginning with a survey of work previously done on the subject, this study attempts to learn more about how, and to what extent, children benefit from pictorial illustrations, with a view to improving instructional materials. Three areas were investigated with experiments using children from nursery schools and kindergarten to sixth grade. The…

Practice in interpreting the critical features of incomplete line drawings and integrating fragmentary visual information was shown to enhance the visual efficiency of partially sighted children, aged 5 to 8. (BW)

Some recent research is examined on childrens' perception of pictures. Implications are drawn for those who create and use illustrated childrens' books. (SJL)

Identifies a function generator as an instrument that produces time-varying electrical signals of frequency, wavelength, and amplitude. Sending these signals to a speaker or a light-emitting diode can demonstrate how specific characteristics of auditory or visual stimuli relate to perceptual experiences. Provides specific instructions for using…

This paper examines children's responses to black and white illustrations in particular silhouettes. The study had two components; the first examined fifth graders' reactions to picture books using silhouette illustrations. The second part of the research analyzed students' responses when a dramatic context was used to view and respond to selected…

A study investigated the size of the perceptual span within which adults use visual information to distinguish among letters as they read. The eye movements of fifteen college students were monitored as they read passages from a cathode-ray tube. On occasional fixations, letters in specified visual regions were replaced by other letters. The…