Newborns were habituated to white squares of varying size and luminance and retested with colored squares for recovery of habituation. Newborns could discriminate yellow-green from white in large squares, but not in small squares. They could not discriminate blue, blue-green, or purple from white. Results suggest newborns have little…

This study found that 13 autistic subjects performed less well on cognitive than on visual perspective-taking tasks at two levels of difficulty. Autistic subjects performed as well as 13 intellectually handicapped controls and 13 normal controls on visual perspective-taking tasks but more poorly than controls on cognitive perspective-taking tasks.…

A rather consistent finding in studies of perceived (imagined) compared to actual movement in a reaching paradigm is the tendency to overestimate at midline. Explanations of such behavior have focused primarily on perceptions of postural constraints and the notion that individuals calibrate reachability in reference to multiple degrees of freedom,…

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…

A 112-item Multi-Modal Articulation Analysis test was administered to 116 Head Start children ranging in age from 4 years, 6 months to 5 years, 5 months. The test involves presenting to the subject an object, or representation thereof, requiring a one-word response. Four modes of stimulus presentation were used: (1) actual objects, (2) black and…

This paper reports two studies which compared scores obtained on the Slosson Intelligence Test (SIT) and Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and investigated the hypothesis that the representational level of the stimulus items in the PPVT is inappropriate for preschool children regardless of socioeconomic background. In the first study, the…

Presented is a test used to measure visual perception ability, which consists of 30 groups of forms that are similar to lines used in forming letters, but do not make letters. They are comparable to nonsense syllables used to simulate words. Each group includes four forms and is numbered. The test was used in Rodenborn's study to determine the…

Verified the relationship between affective states and visual behavior in nonpsychotics. Elated individuals engaged in more total eye contact and had longer but less frequent eye-contact gazes than normals and depressed subjects had less total eye contact and had fewer eye-contact gazes than individuals in a neutral affective state. (Author)

Assessed the effect of the amount of physical detail in pictures on the picture recognition memory of 7- and 9-year-olds, young adults, and adults over 68. For each age group, recognition accuracy was significantly higher for pictures presented in the simple rather than the complex form. (PCB)

Evaluates models of infant visual preferences with predictions based on the physical attributes of visual patterns using pairs of schematic faces and abstract patterns identical except for contrast reversals. Results suggest that a fundamental change in the determinants of visual preference occurs postnatally between 6 and 12 weeks. (Author/RWB)

Study examines the role of figural characteristics in the development of pictorial inferences. Results indicate that although the pictorial inferences drawn by kindergarteners are heavily influenced by figural representations, such figural dependency cannot account for all of the observed developmental differences. (Author/RWB)

Investigated the structural pictorial properties of a children's version of The Family Environment Scale as a content validity study of the scale. Age differences in results between third- and seventh-grade children were confirmed, and social comprehension levels increased with age. Implications for present use and future research are discussed.…

Attempted to identify differences between human figure drawings of adult and juvenile child molesters and adult and juvenile control groups, based on ratings obtained for psychodiagnostic signs. Results revealed, for the molesters, factors of overall quality with a component of gender identity confusion, figure-size only, fingers only, and hidden…

Although the performance of American 5- and 8-year-olds was superior to the Guatemalans, the 11-year-olds in both cultures performed at an equally high level. (Authors)

Study explored the manner in which young children utilize meaning clues implicit in nonlinguistic aspects of context to aid comprehension of difficult sentences. (Editor)