Examined visual search for compound patterns in 6-, 8-, 10-, and 22-year-olds. Found large improvements with age in search rate for long-range targets; search rate for short-range targets was fairly constant across age. This pattern held regardless of ease of perceptual access to target, supporting the hypothesis of different processes involved at…

Five children with autism were taught to match printed words to corresponding pictures. Participants' speed of learning was compared across three training conditions, each involving a 5-s delay of reinforcement, using a within-participants alternating treatments design. In the cue-value condition, a verbal phrase of approval (e.g., "good!") was…

Study supported in part by a grant from the Research Council of the University of Massachusetts.

A study of the commonality of associations of 50 lexical and 50 structural words by 80 kindergarten children indicated that (1) there was no significant difference in commonality of responses between lexical and structural words, (2) there was a difference in commonality relations for the sexes, and (3) there was more commonality in responses to…

Reports that intonational contrasts in reading "yes-no" list items may both influence the reporting of the items themselves and have indirect outcomes by influencing affective-motivational respondent states. (RL)

The personality characteristics which were found to be related to stimulus seeking seem to follow from the basic premise that the stimulus seeker has a stronger than average need to seek out and approach situations, activities, and ideas which are novel, changing, complex, surprising, or more intense. (Author)

Two experiments conducted to examine the methods that have been hypothesized to characterize the learning of paired associates. (Author/MM)

Article describes an experiment showing through paired associate testing how different groups can have the same total learning time. (Author/MM)

A study of doctrinaire rhetoric and extremism which notes consistent patterns of thought and of audience-speaker interaction amoung diverse doctrinaire groups. Concludes that doctrine shapes rhetorical styles as well as content and suggests the possibility of interpreting and evaluating social phenomena through the analysis of rehetoric. (JB)

A comparison was made between two procedures for testing whether an alpha-numeric character, which was pattern masked to prevent awareness, could access higher-order information concerning its category. (Author)

Three studies explored children's distinctions between mental and bodily reactions to contamination. Found that children distinguished reactions mediated by representations from those mediated by physical interactions. Data suggested that preschoolers distinguished between physical and mental reactions to contamination but had a poor understanding…

After repeated associations between two events, E1 and E2, responses to E2 can be facilitated either because participants consciously expect E2 to occur after E1 or because E1 automatically activates the response to E2, or because of both. In this article, the authors report on 4 experiments designed to pit the influence of these 2 factors against…

Preferential looking behavior to stimuli varying in temporal frequency was examined in 11 prematurely born, Black and Hispanic infants when they were between 37 and 39 weeks of postconceptional age. Infants were tested one hour after they had fed on two successive days. Infants were unswaddled during testing on the first day, and swaddled during…