This study examined behavioral correlates of the rapid central nervous system changes occurring in the first 4 months of life. It was hypothesized that during the early months of infancy, visual preference would occur as a function of quantitative dimensions of the stimuli (size) which could be mediated at a subcortical level. It was further…

An attempt to isolate possible effects of the application of visual reminders on learning by TV. The underlying assumption was that learning by means of television and other visual media can be enhanced by methodically applying visual reminders. (Author)

The episodic buffer component of working memory is assumed to play a role in the binding of features into chunks. A series of experiments compared memory for arrays of colors or shapes with memory for bound combinations of these features. Demanding concurrent verbal tasks were used to investigate the role of general attentional processes,…

Young infants have repeatedly been shown to be slower than older infants to shift fixation from a midline stimulus to a peripheral stimulus. This is generally thought to reflect maturation of the neural substrates that mediate the disengagement of attention, but this developmental difference may also be attributable to young infants' slower…

This study examines serial habituation in a sample of 54 infants aged 2, 3, and 4 months to determine whether age changes are partially a function of different "strategies" rather than simply different rates of habituation. The serial habituation hypothesis proposes that attention and habituation of attention proceed in order of the relative…

It was concluded that previous explanations of visual exploration or stimulus preference have been oversimplified, and studies on the whole have failed to take into account a crucial interaction between sex and age variables. (Authors)

Two experiments show that action alters the shape categories formed by 2-year-olds. Experiment 1 shows that moving an object horizontally (or vertically) defines the horizontal (or vertical) axis as the main axis of elongation and systematically changes the range of shapes seen as similar. Experiment 2 shows that moving an object symmetrically (or…

Visual acuity as a function of target position and density was measured in a letter recognition task. A homogeneous pattern of equally-spaced elements was tachistoscopically exposed, where the target was never located at the boundaries of the pattern. The target was marked with a spatial cue to control attentional processes. With such a spatial…

This study was designed to determine if the failure of previous investigations to find habituation and response to novelty in infants younger than 2 months of age was because the stimuli used were too complex or because a constant number of trials rather than an individual criterion of habituation was used. A total of 24 infants between 5 and 6…

This study indicated that the dimensions of the configuration provided by INDSCAL multidimensional scaling are psychologically relevant to learning the concept of artistic style and that sensitivity to these dimensions, as measured by INDSCAL subject weights, can predict important individual differences in responses to another group of stimuli.…

Two experiments explored the nature of perceptual development in 5- and 10-year olds and adults. The primary finding was that preassessed salience significantly influenced 5-year olds' ability to discriminate two objects, while salience did not affect 10-year olds' or adults' response times. Results showed that salience effects in perceptual…

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.…

In a study of attending behavior during the crossover period (12-13 years), when preferences shift from auditory to visual stimuli, females switched their preferences significantly earlier than did males. Besides biological factors, these sex differenes were attributed to differential conditioning of attitudes, reinforcement, and discrimination…

The attentional blink refers to the finding that the 2nd of 2 targets embedded in a stream of rapidly presented distractors is often missed. Whereas most theories of the attentional blink focus on limited-capacity processes that occur after target selection, the present work investigates the selection process itself. Identifying a target letter…

Overselective stimulus control was assessed in 29 students at residential schools for individuals with developmental disabilities. Overselectivity testing included three different delayed identity matching-to-sample tasks. Sample stimuli for the Form/Color Test were nine possible combinations of three colors and three forms. On each trial, the S+…