A study examined the effects of rational-emotive therapy (RET) and visualization as interventions to reduce communication apprehension as measured by the Personal Report of Communication Anxiety-25. Forty-seven undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of three groups: RET, visualization, or an attention-placebo group. The RET group…

Reading is fundamental to learning. Vital to learning is memory, which is the mental faculty used to retrieve what was read and understood. The human brain is about the size of a grapefruit and weighs about as much as a head of cabbage. The cerebral cortex is a kind of problem-solving and memorizing device. The hippocampus plays a critically…

G. Wolford's perturbation model of letter identification is designed to account for identification errors of briefly presented characters. Its chief assumptions are that features are extracted in parallel, that some of these features become perturbed or mislocalized, and that mislocalizations are more likely to occur in the direction of the fovea…

Conventional experimental research in mental imagery and visualization presents conflicting findings. Naturalistic inquiry offers an alternative approach for the study of mental imagery and problem solving. Paulo Freire, for example, used a naturalistic approach that emphasized active involvement in learning. Imagery can play an important role in…

Criticizes psycholinguistic experiments where messages are presented in vacuo and where the linguist has no intention of conveying a message to the subject, who fills in his own contextual frame. When utterances were presented with pictures, they were remembered more accurately than when they were repeated ten times. (SCC)

Theory and research concerning the development of spatial concepts by young children are discussed. Results of Martin and Kidder are compared with those of Piaget. (SD)

This 535-page document includes more than 60 papers presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the Visual Literacy Association. Topics cover a wide range of visual literacy interests: computer generated graphics, message design, desktop publishing, photography, critical viewing skills, memory enhancement, and the development of visual…

Imagery has a significant role in cognitive development. Reading research has established the fact that good readers image spontaneously and that there is a high interrelationship between overall preference for a story, the amount of text-related imagery in the story, comprehension, and recall. Imagery researchers agree that everyone is capable of…

This study examined the effects and interaction of multiple and linear visual presentation modes and cognitive style on performance in a visual location task. Subjects were 132 undergraduate college students (40 males, 92 females) in professional education courses. The Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT, Wilkin et al., 1971) was used to identify…

Interdisciplinary approaches to instruction are generally dominated by linearity, with an emphasis on linear progressive time. A more productive approach is the development of spatial constructs that provide a more directly visual approach to thought and discussion. The study of languages and cultures will be more effective if students are given…

The director of a not-for-profit nursery school adapted the adult stress management techniques of exercise and relaxation for use with 3- to 5-year-old children. Specifically, children were taught visualization techniques and yoga exercises involving deep breathing. The goal of the practicum was to rechannel children's negative stress-related…

Seven memory strategies that can be taught to college students with learning disabilities or students who have not learned essential study skills are described: the method of loci, pegwords, keywords, rote rehearsal, chaining, clustering, and first letter mnemonics. To help college faculty provide direct instruction in the memory strategies, the…

People daydream, plan, and anticipate. They think frequently about their own actual or potential behaviors, and create behavioral scenarios (or scripts) in which they are the main character. To investigate the relationship between thinking about a behavior and one's expectancies or intentions to perform that behavior, subjects (N=93) in Experiment…

The four sections of this paper provide an analysis of the structure of human memory. The first section, intended to provide a clear example of personal memory, examines a hypothetical episode in the life of an undergraduate student, and shows how one episode can give rise to three different forms of memory: personal, semantic, and rote…

Five methods are given for computing the area of a regular octahedron. It is suggested that students first construct an octahedron as this will aid in space visualization. Six further extensions are left for the reader to try. (LS)