For 15 years an ongoing research project at the University of Pittsburgh has focused on the effects of variations in visual complexity and color on the storage and retrieval of visual information by learners. Research has shown that visual materials facilitate instruction, but has not fully delineated the interactions of visual complexity and…

The paper describes the use of an operant procedure to assess the speech perception of 11 young (7 to 35 months old) hearing impaired children and 11 normally hearing subjects. Subjects were presented with a repeating background stimulus and conditioned to turn their head on presentation of a contrasting syllable. The head-turning responses were…

Comparisons of television shows along genre lines suggest significant elements of aural/visual richness as well as valuable categories of comparison for future use in other comparisons. An examination of two sitcoms and two police shows produced roughly 25 years apart--"Make Room for Daddy" with "The Cosby Show" and "Naked…

Two studies were conducted to train students to use imagery in their learning and to investigate whether such training would transfer to solving visual puzzles and verbal problems. In the first study, with 78 graduate students, 29 experimental-group subjects were given a lecture and slide presentation designed to teach about imagery. Both the…

Human infants are sensitive from birth to some intrinsic properties of objects; they are also sensitive to position. During the first weeks of life, pertinent dimensions of differentiation between objects are relative to global properties of the entire object or pattern. Position is defined by the direction of a displacement: the trajectory…

For centuries artists have explored the uses of color in their compositions. Believing that colors have innate symbolic, expressive, and aesthetic qualities, artists have been aware that these properties can be magnified or subdued by organization within a compositional space, and artists have suggested that certain positions within a framed field…

The present research assessed the ability to attend to relevant information in the presence of irrelevant distraction in hyperactive (H), learning disabled (LD), and unselected (US) children. A total of 20 LD, 20 H, and 20 US children divided into younger and older age groups participated in the study. Younger children were between 94 and 104…

The effectiveness of the use of self-reported imagery strategies on children's subsequent memory performance was studied, and the coding redundancy hypothesis that memory is facilitated by using an encoding procedure in both words and images was tested. The two levels of reported memory strategy (imagize, verbalize) were crossed with "think…

Based on the conviction that research findings on effective design of educational television programs may have useful lessons for designers of educational computing software, this paper reviews research on children's educational television and discusses ways in which the findings can be applied. The paper divides the research findings into the…

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the television production components and to suggest the research hypotheses and designs that will yield a more systematic exploration of the importance of the use of facial closeups in television interviews. The first part of the paper discusses three potential factors that may influence a viewer's judgment…

The selection matrix is an attempt to provide an efficient, effective, and practical basis for selecting the instructional medium possessing more specific learner-situation-task attributes than others. The selection matrix provides three important capabilities by (1) identifying a number of appropriate media and isolating them, (2) reducing the…

In an attempt to address the issue of bimodal coordination of featural stimuli, the sensitivity of 3-month-old infants to the auditory and visual components of male and female stimulus configurations was examined. Measures were made of the infants' visual attention to a male or female face while they listened to a male voice, female voice, or to…

The ability of 5-month-old infants to recognize two-dimensional (pictorial) representations of three-dimensional objects was investigated. Subjects were 24 5-month-old infants. The novelty preference technique was employed: all infants were familiarized with a three-dimensional object--a doll. Following familiarization, three novelty tests were…

Averaged evoked potential (AEP) is an event-related brain response obtained by averaging the scalp electrical potentials elicited by repeated presentations of the same event. It has proven to be an accurate measure of the activity of the mature human brain when involved in a wide variety of psychological tasks. Distinct psychological processes…

In this study the relationship between mother's teaching style (verbal instruction vs. demonstration) and the child's performance on four memory tests was investigated. Mothers' teaching style with 9-year-old children was observed in an induced teaching situation in the home, in a Guatemalan Maya town. In the induced teaching situation, the mother…