This study focused on the psychological process involved in drawing inferences from pictures. Nineteen reference tests and two tests of picture interpretation behavior were administered to a random sample of 95 children aged 10-12: the Production of Inference Tests (PIT) and the Discovery of Similarities Test (DST). (JEG)

Voluntary Visual Attention concerns "natural" viewing behavior or visual browsing when the subject is under no constraints regarding the distribution of attention. A general overview of this area of psychological investigation is presented. (Author/JKS)

The special issue presents a collection of 10 studies presented at a major workshop on Usher's Syndrome (a condition of congenital deafness accompanied by progressive loss of vision) which was sponsored by the South Central Regional Center for Deaf-blind Children in Dallas, Texas, September, 1977. (IM)

Recent empirical research into the meaning of words for color provides evidence that contradicts two widely held beliefs in linguistics and the philosophy of language. This paper presents a summary of this evidence, uses it as a basis to construct a general model of basic color-term semantics, and explores the implications of this model for…

Ninety-six mildly mentally retarded persons and 96 nonretarded college students estimated the frequency of occurrence of words and pictures in a study test paradigm. Frequency estimates were equal for words, but the nonretarded subjects were superior in accuracy on pictorial items. This finding points to an encoding deficiency attributed to…

Examined the stability of two aspects of infant visual attention derived from the paired-comparison procedure in infants tested at 6, 7, and 8 months of age. The two aspects were novelty preference and exposure time. Suggests that both novelty and exposure-time scores reflect moderately stable but independent characteristics of infant behavior.…

Undergraduates were given complex figural analogies items, and eye movements were observed under three types of feedback: (1) elaborate feedback; (2) subjects verbalized their thinking and application of rules; and (3) no feedback. Both feedback conditions enhanced the rule-governed information processing during inductive reasoning. (Author/GDC)

It was concluded that the scaled preference values have high face validity and that they suggest the need for reexamination of some previous experimental results. (Author)

A novelty preference method was used to examine memory processes in retarded persons. Recognition memory as indexed by novel looking declined over the retention interval. Since memory is being inferred from response preferences which reflect an induced motivational state, satiation, the relationship between this state and memory must be…

Forty five-year-olds compared two arms of an L-shaped figure on-axis or perpendicular to axis inside circles of different diameters. In making perceptual judgments about the relative length, the children tended to describe the on-axis line as longer. The context model of visual anomalies was supported. (Author/CM)

The purpose of this study is to: (1) examine the relative effectiveness with which different types of visual test formats facilitated information retrieval on tests measuring different educational objectives; (2) measure the effect that prior knowledge had on information retrieval; and (3) to determine whether an interaction existed between prior…

The authors investigated whether emotional pictorial stimuli are especially likely to be processed in parafoveal vision. Pairs of emotional and neutral visual scenes were presented parafoveally (2.1[degrees] or 2.5[degrees] of visual angle from a central fixation point) for 150-3,000 ms, followed by an immediate recognition test (500-ms delay).…

This study examined 2- to 3-year-olds' ability to make a pretend-real distinction in the absence of content cues. Children watched two actors side by side. One was really eating, and the other was pretending to eat, but in neither case was information about content available. Following the displays, children were asked to retrieve the real food…

Fifty-five college students participated in a study investigating the effect of field dependence and time limitations on the solution of mathematics word problems and visual interpretation problems. Field-independent (n=25) and field-dependent (n=30) subjects represented the upper and lower thirds on the Hidden Figures Test. Field-independent…