The present study assessed the relations between basic motor abilities in kindergarten and scholastic, social, and emotional adaptation in the transition to formal schooling. Seventy-one five-year-old kindergarten children were administered a battery of standard assessments of basic motor functions. A year later, children's adjustment to school…

According to the spatial registration hypothesis, the representation of stimulus location is automatically encoded during perception and it can interact with a more abstract linguistic representation. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments, using the semantic judgements of words. In the first experiment, words for animals that either fly or…

Failure to attain handwriting competency during the school-age years often has far-reaching negative effects on both academic success and self-esteem. This complex occupational task has many underlying component skills that may interfere with handwriting performance. Fine motor control, bilateral and visual-motor integration, motor planning,…

Joseph Coencas shows scenes from films to help special education students improve their visual and auditory skills, build confidence in their abilities to talk about and analyze the components of a narrative, and feel comfortable engaging in class discussion and writing. He also encourages students to pursue their interests in subjects they have…

The aim of the present study was to assess the findings, reported in earlier studies, that individuals with autism spectrum disorders process visuo-spatial tasks faster than typically developing control persons. The participants in the present study were children and adolescents with Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA) (N =…

Background: The study investigated a small range of cognitive abilities, related to visual-spatial intelligence, in adolescents. This specific range of cognitive abilities was termed "graphic abilities" and defined as a range of abilities to visualise and think in three dimensions, originating in the domain of visual-spatial…

Neurophysiological evidence is described showing that some neurons in the macaque inferior temporal visual cortex have responses that are invariant with respect to the position, size and view of faces and objects, and that these neurons show rapid processing and rapid learning. Which face or object is present is encoded using a distributed…

This paper contrasts classical Aristotelian narrative, which encouraged intellectual reflection and came to dominate Hollywood film by the 1930s, with the pulsating images which began to appear in the 1980 as a result of MTV's influence on films. The discussion focuses on two major Hollywood films: "Grapes of Wrath" (1940) and "Top…

"Thick descriptions" are descriptions that are layered enough to draw conclusions and uncover the intentions of a given act, event, or process. In a video environment, thick descriptions are images, gestures, or sequences that convey meaning. Neither the quantity nor the resolution of the images makes the descriptions thick. Thickness is…

This study compared the central capacity and the modularity models for explaining language processing in kindergarten children. Using a microcomputer, 19 kindergarten children completed a visual letter-matching task that required a manual response. An auditory tone was emitted by the computer in a separate trial also requiring a press. For the…

This paper presents three experiments examining competence in the domain of proportional reasoning in several age groups (adult, and children in kindergarten, first, third, and fifth grade). In the three experiments, subjects indicated which of two flower boxes had the greater density of flowers. In experiments 1 and 2, the flowers were presented…

Five experiments involving a total of 44 college students addressed the effects of intercomponent consistency on skill acquisition in a class of cognitively demanding tasks requiring rapid integration of information and rapid application of rules. The role of consistency of external stimulus-to-rule linkage in facilitating learning and performing…

The perceptual bases of visual literacy are explored, drawing on research into the interpretation of pictures by viewers not familiar with pictorial representation. Research has indicated that inexperienced viewers do not find it difficult to recognize pictures that may be discrepant in color or shape from a familiar object, but may be troubled by…

This book is intended to help teachers and librarians introduce elementary school students to the concepts and aesthetics of art appreciation using some of the best picture books available. The book analyzes the artwork of more than 50 award-winning picture books from cover to cover, and shows teachers and librarians how to discuss the art of each…

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…