Examined age differences in the missing-letter effect during letter-detection tasks. Found expected increase in magnitude with age of the effect even when function words and content words were equated for frequency. Word scrambling improved letter detection in function words compared to content words among older subjects, arguing against increased…

A study evaluated the ability of a dynamic visual assessment and training protocol to improve the ability of 65 persons with legal blindness to detect environmental hazards. Training improved the ability of the majority to detect hazards. The assessments also identified those who did not need training or would not benefit. (Contains references.)…

Introduces a collection of short papers that focus on the body, visual culture, and semiotic awareness. States that the papers ask how do we know what we know, through what filters do we understand, and what codes are used to make sense of the world? (CMK)

States that teachers must "face" themselves in order to encourage experimentation with practices that evoke embodied experiences. Discusses "facing yourself," the process of knowing who you are, who you are not, and allowing for the self-transformation that should follow. (CMK)

Three studies investigated the role of surface attributes in infants' identification of agents, using a habituation paradigm designed to tap infants' interpretation of grasping as goal directed (Woodward, 1998). When they viewed a bare human hand grasping objects, 7- and 12-month-old infants focused on the relation between the hand and its goal.…

Auditory and auditory-visual (AV) speech perception skills were examined in adults with and without language-learning disabilities (LLD). The AV stimuli consisted of congruent consonant-vowel syllables (auditory and visual syllables matched in terms of syllable being produced) and incongruent McGurk syllables (auditory syllable differed from…

The relation between cognitive and motor performance was studied in a sample of 378 children aged 5-6. Half of these children had no behavior problems; the others were selected for externalizing (38%) or internalizing problems (12%). Quantitative and qualitative aspects of motor performance were related to several aspects of cognition, after…

A series of experiments introduced interruptions to the execution phase of simple Tower of London problems and found that the opportunity for preparation before the break in task reduced the time cost at resumption. Retrieval of the suspended goal was facilitated when participants were given the opportunity to encode retrieval cues during an…

This cross-site, collaborative study focused on the instructional practices of three middle school art teachers from Arizona, Indiana, and New York. The researchers found similarities as well as differences among the teachers' strategies. At all three sites, emphasis was on curriculum related to their students' lives, developing technical skills,…

A variant of a line bisection test was devised. Patients with unilateral visual neglect and control subjects were asked to perform the test, which consisted of two subtasks: a verbal and a manual task. The verbal task was newly designed and did not require manual responses from the subjects. The manual task was similar to conventional line…

This article reports 3 experiments in which effects of orthographic and phonological word length on memory were examined for short lists shown at rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and short-term memory (STM) rates. Only visual-orthographic length reduced RSVP serial recall, whereas both orthographic and phonological length lowered recall for…

Research over the past two decades has demonstrated that individuals are better at recognizing and discriminating faces of their own race versus other races. The own-race effect has typically been investigated in relation to recognition memory; however, some evidence supports an own-race effect at the level of perceptual encoding in adults. The…

Researchers in early social-cognition have found that the ability to reverse an ambiguous figure is correlated with success on theory of mind tasks (e.g. Gopnik & Rosati, 2001). The present experiment examined children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) without mental delay to see whether a similar relationship existed. Ropar, Mitchell, and…

This paper investigates whether there is a correlation between a poor Visual Attention Span (VAS) and the child's optometric status. Convergence excess impacts most upon a male achieving a VAS-3 more than 75 per cent of the time. Fifty per cent of females with eye-teaming problems are unlikely to achieve a VAS-3 more than 25 per cent of the time.…

In this study, the authors investigated the relation between early social contingency experiences and infants' competencies to detect nonsocial contingencies. In this study of 87 three-month-old infants, the authors operationalized early social contingencies as prompt, contingent maternal responses and coded microanalytically on the basis of…