A study compared 11 Italian children (ages 7-11) with nonverbal learning disabilities (NVLD) to 49 controls on four tasks requiring visuospatial working memory and visual imagery. Results found the children with NVLD showed deficits in the use of visuospatial working memory and visual imagery. (Author/CR)

Studied whether patterns of developmental progression in reality monitoring were present in visual and auditory modalities and the role of cross-modal imagery in reality-monitoring tasks. Found scores revealed evidence of developmental progression in both auditory and visual source-monitoring tasks, but no effect of cross-modal imagery. (Author)

Assessed development of infants' sensitivity to two nested amodal temporal relations in audible and visible events. Found that sensitivity to synchrony was present by 4 weeks, remaining stable across age. Sensitivity to composition emerged by 7 weeks, increasing dramatically with age. Noted pattern of increasing specificity in perception…

Examined role of phonological awareness and visual-orthographic skills in Chinese reading acquisition among first, second, third, and fifth graders who had learned the Hanyu Pinyin script. Found that visual skills predicted reading success at lower grades; pinyin knowledge and ability to discriminate homophonic characters predicted reading success…

Examined two aspects of the specificity of practice hypothesis using a tracking task. In one experiment, visual or auditory feedback about performance was provided. In a second experiment, visual and auditory information were combined. Both experiments supported the specificity of practice hypothesis. Instructing participants to attend to one…

Focuses on the author's "semiotic self" by presenting questions and reflections. Discusses the overlapping groups to which one's multiple "selves" belong. Explains that these groups consist of people who share vocabulary, rituals, and understandings. (CMK)

Eight crows were taught to discriminate overlapping pairs of visual stimuli (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-). For 4 birds, the stimuli were colored cards with a circle of the same color on the reverse side whose diameter decreased from A to E (ordered feedback group). These circles were made available for comparison to potentially help the crows…

Infants' ability to track temporarily occluded objects that moved on circular trajectories was investigated in 20 infants using a longitudinal design. They were first seen at 6 months and then every 2nd month until the end of their 1st year. Infants were presented with occlusion events covering 20% of the target's trajectory (effective occlusion…

A fundamental question of perceptual development concerns how infants come to perceive partly hidden objects as unified across a spatial gap imposed by an occluder. Much is known about the time course of development of perceptual completion during the first several months after birth, as well as some of the visual information that supports unity…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a software package that can be used for performing such routine tasks as controlling listening experiments (e.g., simple labeling, discrimination, sentence intelligibility, and magnitude estimation), recording responses and response latencies, analyzing and plotting the results of those experiments,…

Research tells us we can learn complex tasks most easily if they are taught in "small sequential steps." This column is about the small sequential steps that unlocked the powers of digital photography, of portraiture, and of student creativity. The strategies and ideas described in this article came as a result of working with…

Children with Specific language Impairment (SLI) have problems with verbal memory, particularly with tasks that have more processing demands. They also have slower speeds of responding for some tasks. To identify the extent to which young children with SLI would differ in performance from age-matched non-impaired children on a set of spatio-visual…

Neglect is an acquired cognitive disorder characterized by a lack of processing of one side of a stimulus or representational space. There are hemispheric asymmetries in its cause and in its effects, but implemented computational models of neglect have tended not to incorporate this fact. The authors report a series of neural network simulations…

U-shaped developmental functions, and their N-shaped cousins, have intrigued developmental psychologists for decades because they provide a compelling demonstration that development does not always entail a monotonic increase across age in a single underlying ability. Instead, the causes of development are much more complex. Indeed,…

This paper presents an assessment tool which can be used during the first weeks of calculus to measure students' visual thinking skills. We have developed and applied this instrument in classes for the last three years, tabulating results and interviewing students on a regular basis. We discuss our findings and provide hints to using the…