Discusses how use of photography in early childhood classrooms enhances visual literacy. Describes how to use photographs in the daily routine to involve parents, build children's identity, and enrich all areas of the curriculum. Also describes use of video cameras in the classroom. (HTH)

Investigates the dominance of global versus local visual properties in four-month-old infants as a function of individual differences in fixation duration. Suggests that long-looking infants process visual information more slowly than short-looking infants, and there may be qualitative differences in the manner in which the two groups of infants…

Explores cognitive development in early childhood education and examines four kinds of prevailing misconceptions in the light of recent evidence: (1) infants and very young children are limited to sensorimotor cognition; (2) young children's cognition is animistic; (3) young children's thought is egocentric; and (4) young children can think only…

Study of the visual development of 38 infants, children, and youths who were neurologically impaired following perinatal hypoxia found that all children showed impairments of 1 or more visual functions, though visual development continued and visual improvements were demonstrated up to age 16. (Author/JDD)

Discusses children's ideas about colored objects and colored shadows, with special attention to the organization of these ideas into mental models. The clarification of these models provides instructional tools that serve to assess and confront students' naive conceptions. Subjects were visitors to a science museum who engaged in interactive…

Studied 18 deaf and 18 hearing childrens' (aged 6.8 to 16.6 years) performance on short-term memory tasks involving production of action responses to previously paired visual stimuli. Deaf children showed superior performance on the simultaneous presentation-free recall task and inferior performance on the serial presentation-serial recall task.…

Examined the effects of age and experience on visual-cognitive performance using a domain-relevant visual search task and a standard letter search task with skilled and control subjects at two age levels. Although young and middle-aged skilled subjects performed equally well on the domain-relevant task, skilled subjects showed an age deficit in…

Infants' visual fixations were monitored while they viewed predictable and unpredictable sequences of stimuli. Analyses of anticipatory fixations indicated that by two months of age, infants form expectations for the reappearance of visual stimuli positioned opposite to each other. By three months, infants rapidly form expectations for asymmetric…

Recent research into the use of articulatory movements by the deaf has revealed the significance of this visual input, but research into the speech perception of the blind has demonstrated the significance of its loss. The implications of these findings for teaching and testing foreign language listening skills are considered. (Author/JL)

A study involving 48 undergraduates found a link between motion detection and letter-position encoding and a positive relationship, albeit a nonlinear one, between motion detection threshold and the likelihood of making letter errors. This result held when age, IQ, reading age, and phonological awareness were taken into account. (CR)

Three experiments compared infants' reactions to videos of normally responsive women varying in eye contact. Found that, relative to frontal faces, three-month olds smiled less at images averting head and eye (H&I), head alone (H), and closing eyes (ECL) but not at averting eyes (E). Five-month-olds smiled less at H&I, E, and ECL but not…

Sixteen school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 16 age-matched controls were tested for immediate recall of digits presented visually, auditorily, or audiovisually. Recall tasks compared speaking and pointing response modalities. SLI children showed small recency effects as well as an unusually poor recall when visually…

Investigated 7-year-olds', 9-year-olds', and adults' ability to classify children's and adults' faces by sex using only biological based internal facial structure. Found that participants categorized adult faces by sex at accuracy levels varying from just above chance (7-year-olds) to nearly perfect (adults). All groups were less accurate for…

Examines current research on brain development, focusing on infants' ability to understand basic numerical concepts and arithmetic operations. Asserts that as the brain undergoes dramatic transformations, it already has a built-in capacity to understand basic numerical concepts. Recommends that parents and professionals engage in activities…

This study investigated the perception of emotions and the social skills of 60 eighth-graders, half with and half without learning disabilities (LD). Results indicated that the performance of LD adolescents was significantly poorer than peers in the perception of emotion via either auditory, visual, or combined auditory-visual modes. Although both…