The most extensive use of dream imagery in popular culture occurs in the visual arts, and in the past five years it has become evident that music video (a semi-narrative hybrid of film and television) is the most dreamlike media product of all. The rampant depiction and implication of dreams and media fantasies in music video are often strongly…

A deconstruction of music videos that makes visible their aesthetic rules or grammar is necessary before an overall theoretical understanding is possible. Content-analytic studies usually divide music videos into two groups: "performance" and "concept" videos. Concept videos, in turn, can be subdivided into two different kinds:…

Involving children 7 and 10 years of age, two experiments aimed to clarify the basis of children's confusion about actions they performed and actions they imagined performing. In experiment 1, subjects were assigned to one of three conditions, each involving two different types of tracing exercises. Children traced simple or complex pictures by…

The purpose of this study was to examine children's recall of verbal information as a function of stimulus action and labels. The same information was presented on either a computer or a felt board. Action and labels were expected to enhance recall, regardless of the presentation medium. In both conditions, an experimenter introduced each child to…

This research study evaluated the effects of memory demand on sustained attention, by varying the time interval between the presentations of stimuli in a cognitive vigilance task. Sixteen retarded and 16 nonretarded adult observers performed four 60-minute visual vigilance tasks in which single digits were presented sequentially and successively…

Research in visual communication suggests that relatively complex graphics stimulate viewer interest, while relatively simple graphics facilitate learning. A study was conducted to determine whether the graphics in two science publications ("Scientific American" and "Sciences 81") would be tailored to the ways in which their…

The relationship between affective responsiveness, synchrony of mother/infant interaction, and developmental status was examined in 32 normal infants (eight infants each at the ages of 4, 8, 12, and 16 weeks). Data were collected in infants' homes and included (1) naturalistic mother/infant play; (2) presentation of auditory, tactile, visual, and…

A survey of a range of introductory university level textbooks in the social sciences found little use of network diagrams (NDs), i.e., graphic representations of processes, organizations, systems, and mechanisms. NDs can be viewed as a text/picture hybrid medium with titles and captions serving to qualify and identify the meaning and status of…

Sustained attention to visual and auditory stimuli and reflection-impulsivity were examined in 48 hyperactive and 48 normal 9 and 14 year old boys. Multivariate analyses, followed by univariate tests, indicated that the nonhyperactive Ss increased sustained attention efficiency with age to both visual and auditory Stimuli. Hyperactive Ss increased…

A gestalt approach to theatrical design seems to provide some ready and stable explanations for a number of issues in the scenic arts. Gestalt serves as the theoretical base for a number of experiments in psychology whose findings appear to delineate the principles of art to be used in scene design. The fundamental notion of gestalt theory…

This study explores the reason why very young infants are unable to respond differentially to faces and the cause for developmental changes in infant face perception by age 3 months. Linear systems analysis (LSA) and the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) were used to estimate the facial pattern information available to 1- and 3-month-old…

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…

This study is an attempt to partially confirm the hypothesis that first grade children, generally lacking the skills and/or capacities for efficiently organizing their memories for verbally-presented information, benefit from illustrations which provide a simple external memory. The sample consisted of 32 first grade (second semester) children,…

This research project assessed: (1) the practicality of recording heart rate in 18-month-old infants as they watched events filmed on color, silent motion picture films; and (2) the validity and sensitivity of heart rate change as an index of differential attention arousal elicited by changes within and between complex visual events. The research…

This study examines attention to stimulus presentation mode (SPM) by children when subdivided by age and sex, and the interaction between these variables. Except for the crossover period, female and male subjects' responses to auditory and visual stimuli follow the same general pattern; younger subjects respond at a greater rate to visual stimuli.…