Based on an M.A. degree submitted to McMaster University, England.

Focusing on the precise grounds on which a person can be said to have solved a problem, six conditions are articulated which govern the application of the concept and its relationship to trying and intention. The "solving" concept is found in synonymous phrases such as "figuring out" and "finding the solution." (Author/CM)

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was analyzed by readability formulas which represent varying criterion of comprehension from 50 to 90 percent. If an examiner wishes to ensure 90 percent comprehension of the inventory items, nine years of successful schooling seem necessary. (Author/SJL)

The influence of task difficulty on aberrant behavior was investigated with three severely handicapped students (10, 13, and 15 years old). Noticeably higher rates of problem behavior occurred in demand compared to no demand conditions. In addition, there were higher rates of problem behaviors on difficult versus easy tasks. (Author)

Two hundred and sixty-six kindergarten, first, second, and third graders completed four tasks measuring their understanding of two aspects of number concepts -- ordinality and cardinality. Data suggest that children acquire understanding of ordinality prior to cardinality. (Author/MP)

Two cognitive tasks (construction of space and recognition of space) were developed to test the emergence of three spatial concepts ("in", "on", and "under"). Subjects were 60 Israeli children between 18 and 30 months of age. Scalogram analysis and analysis of variance confirmed that "in" concepts developed…

Scores within the chance range are differentiated, "uninterpretable" scores being those that demonstrate randomness (broadly defined) by failing to achieve typical levels of correlation with group-determined difficulty. The relevant literature is reviewed. Finally, randomness and uninterpretability are examined in light of the…

Examines stability of individual differences in behaviorally induced heart-rate reactivity in 34 boys presented a cognitive task. Task-related heart-rate reactivity revealed substantial and highly reproducible individual differences in heart-rate reactivity independent of subjects' task performance. (Author/DB)

Syllogisms with missing conclusions, missing minor and major premises, as well as missing negative conclusion and missing conclusion to a class chain, were given to 160 gifted children (20 each from ages 4-11) to investigate the order of difficulty of certain principles of logic and the age at which these principles are acquired. (MP)

Aesthetic preferences for overlapping geometrical figures were studied in subjects ages 6 through 14 in the context of the theory of functional pleasure. Results confirmed the hypothesis that the complexity level (number of crossings) of the preferred stimulus varies with the subjects' perceptual capacities, which develop with age. (Author/SJL)

A 22-question interview was conducted with 41 severely hearing impaired students at tht National Technical Institute for the Deaf in order to compare speech intelligibility in communicating social and technical information and in responses which varied in message predictability. (Author/PHR)

Results of an informal experiment conducted with five seven-year-olds and three nine-year-olds suggest that being able to infer well from a piece of reading material does not necessarily prevent children from making mistakes at the level of literal comprehension. (GT)