Thurstone's landmark papers on psychophysics, published in the twenties, are discussed in this presidential address to the Psychometric Society. The development of psychophysics from Thurstone to the present is presented in some detail. (JKS)

Three experiments are reported on behavioral inference in children of 3 to 5 years of age. In each experiment the children learned two separate sequences of behavior which they were required to put together in the final test stage in order to obtain a reward. (MS)

Four of eight low-functioning, developmentally delayed preschool children initially failed to demonstrate expected oddity responding. In the context of a multiple baseline across-subject design, each of the previously unsuccessful children demonstrated significant increases in the percentage of correct oddity responses immediately upon…

The hypothesis testing abilities of 15 language impaired and 15 normally developing children matched for mental age were investigated using discrimination-learning tasks. Findings indicated the impaired children performed poorer than non-impaired children especially on the nonexplicit problems suggesting the deficits may be related to difficulties…

The paper reviews research on the choice discrimination program, a method of teaching receptive language to severely handicapped children. The writer's own work using this method is compared to previous research, and he suggests that the approach may be useful with other groups. (CL)

Examined seven-month-old infants' perceptions of happy and fearful facial expressions. Infants could generalize discrimination of expressions across male and female faces if first familiarized with happy faces. Infants tended to look longer at fear faces than at happy faces. Preferential responding was not specific to any individual face.…

Confirms that single-hue color cues facilitate initial learning without being disruptive at transfer. (RB)

Four hundred children ages 5, 9, and 12 were given a component selection task with stimuli differing in color and shape. Results indicate a greater tendency for older than younger children to withdraw attention from a normally dominant component when advantageous to adopt another feature as the primary functional cue. (Author/SB)

Response to PS 502 660. (CB)

Relevant features of letter-like forms were emphasized visually or verbally. Results indicated visual emphasis facilitated identification of variations of the forms. (ST)

If learning is viewed in terms of the tendency to approach a stimulus that has been rewarded and to avoid a stimulus that has not been rewarded, then it must be concluded that the subjects in this study did not learn. (Author)

Investigation is concerned with the nature of the memory representation that serves as a basis for frequency judgments. (Author)

In general, the study confirmed the prediction that learning of a discrimination under punishment or a reward-punishment condition is superior to that under reward alone. (Authors)

Subjects were 359 children divided by grade (3 and 6), culture (U.S. and Indian), and sex. Hypothesis was that developmental, cross-cultural, and sex differences would be found in the perception of situational causality. All cross-cultural and developmental differences were found to be significant for U.S. children but not for Indian children. (RJ)