To provide converging support that the proper integration of analog and propositional representational systems is associated with spatial ability, the visual, auditory, and bimodal brain event-related potentials were recorded from 50 right-handed Caucasian males. Sensory interaction indices were derived for these subjects who had taken the Surface…

Two studies investigate the way in which children make sense of a play and the visual, aural, and psychological components of theatre which contribute to this comprehension. In the first study, 32 fifth graders saw "Don Quixote of La Mancha." In the second study, 45 third graders saw "Monkey, Monkey" (about the Chinese Monkey King). The day after…

This study considered two questions about infants' perception of affective expressions: (1) Can infants distinguish between happiness and anger on the basis of facial motion information alone? (2) Can infants detect a correspondence between happy and angry facial and vocal expressions by different people? A total of 40 infants of 7 months of age…

The concept of adding pictures to text to attempt to produce significantly better recall when instructors are not available was examined in this study. Forty-seven undergraduates, selected from an original group of 90 who took the Group Embedded Figures Test, were classified as field independent or field dependent, and randomly assigned to one of…

This study explored children's play behavior as it may be influenced by a particular type of television programming, i.e., shows based on commercially available toys. Subjects were two groups of 5- to 6-year-old and 7- to 8-year-old boys who were exposed to a representative program, The Transformers, which features the Transformer toys. Exposure…

Levels of independent variable(s) are often mixed within each block of trials rather than each level being presented in a separate block in research of various types. Two experiments involving tasks of a visual nature were conducted to demonstrate that such mixing can easily obscure the effects of principal interest. A target circle was projected…

Previous studies of the effect of age and modality on digit span task performance have yielded inconsistent results. To eliminate some of the methodological difficulties in prior research, 18 college students and 18 older adults were given the digit span task by means of three different modalities: (1) visual successive; (2) visual simultaneous;…

This study was designed to investigate whether age differences in timesharing performance would be found if the baseline performance of younger and older children was experimentally equated. Two groups of twelve 8-year-olds and one group of twelve 13-year-olds participated. Each subject performed a compensatory tracking task and an auditory…

In a visual recognition masking experiment, a target stimulus to be identified is either preceded or followed by a second stimulus called a masking stimulus. The experiments described here provide estimates of both developmental and aging differences in visual backward masking under conditions which maximize interference in the central visual…

Three experiments were performed in which subjects were exposed to two sizes of the Embedded Figures Test (EFT), and subjects in the third experiment were also exposed to two sizes of the Rod and Frame Test (RFT). In the first experiment, where the EFT had a size differential of 1 to 4, a nonsignificant size effect and a significant rank…

Perhaps due to misunderstandings of the nature of the research task in visual communication, findings of empirical research in that field have been highly inconsistent. Historically, there has been little serious systematic empirical investigation of visual communication. One difficulty is that it is not always possible to measure nonverbal…

Nonverbal behavior is an important aspect of the film and is one of the several tools that a director uses to communicate to an audience the characters' feelings and relationships. By adding to this information their own personal responses, viewers often experience strong feelings. With reference to the social psychological research of nonverbal…

An experiment tested the hypothesis that the outcome of a vocal nonverbal persuasion attempt can be affected by the participants' skills in nonverbal communication. Subjects' vocal sending or decoding abilities were pretested. Senders and decoders (N=54) were agents and recipients of social influence, respectively, in a field experiment in which…

A familiarization procedure was used in two experiments investigating word encoding in second and sixth graders. Previous studies using release from proactive inhibition had indicated that developmental changes on some encoding dimensions occur during this period. It is argued that the dependence of release from proactive inhibition on deliberate…

Visual field theory was examined insofar as television viewers' perception, retention, and preference for still visual images were concerned. The purpose of the experimental investigation was to determine whether the specific shapes, colors, and placement of visuals within a picture frame affected viewers' abilities to perceive, describe, and…