Three experiments tested for developmental changes in attention to auditory and visual signals. Results showed that adults and seven-year-olds tended to allocate their attention to vision rather than audition when no precue was provided. While not entirely consistent, results with four-year-olds suggested a similar biasing of attention to vision.…

Thirty-two three-month-old infants participated in two experiments showing color videotapes of facial stimuli in a paired comparison format. Suggests that contrast in effect of eye contact availability and rather subtle stimulus motion (blinking) implies that three-month-old infants are comparatively insensitive to being the object of another's…

This study examined relationships among lens color, visual grating, visual detection task performance, and peripheral retinal brightness thresholds among four adults and four children with reading disabilities and age-matched controls. Subjects with reading disabilities displayed significantly lower contrast sensitivity when tested with sine-wave…

Assesses performance of 9-, 13-, and 20-year-olds on 3,840 trials of a mental rotation task in which subjects judged if pairs of stimuli presented in different orientations were identical or mirror images. Results are discussed in terms of possible mechanisms underlying the impact of practice. (Author/NH)

Preschool children's evaluation and integration of visual and auditory information in speech perception was compared with that of adults. Results were used to test current views of the development of perceptual categorization and speech perception. (Author/RH)

This report documents a computer-based gaming system for assessing recognition performance (RECOG). The game management system is programmed in a modular manner to: instruct the student on how to play the game, retrieve and display individual images, keep track of how well individuals play and provide them feedback, and link these components by…

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…

Three experiments with observers aged 6 to 21 years of age examined the integration of shape information over successive glances. Results indicated age-related improvements in the sequential integration of shape information, both when integration occurs through successive glimpses over space and when information is separated only in time. (HOD)

This study examined the discriminability of lexigrams versus printed words with eight adults with severe mental retardation. A match-to-sample teaching paradigm was used. Subjects discriminated lexigrams better than printed letters and were more successful at matching lexigrams to referent objects than matching printed words to referent objects.…

Second-graders, fifth-graders, and adults participated in an experiment of cued recall for cue-target picture and word pairs. Results suggested that differences in the encoding of both specific and categorical attribute information contribute to developmental recall differences independently of encoding intent and stimulus modality. (Author/CB)

Examines whether kindergarteners, second-graders, fourth-graders, and adults can extract relative weight information from observing collisions and lifting events, and if they can judge whether or not collisions are momentum-conserving. Subjects saw either videotapes of events or sequences of static images; younger children appeared to be…

Twenty-four adults with mild mental retardation were compared with equal-mental age children and adults without mental retardation on tactile processing asymmetries. Results suggest that hemispheric processing is dependent on information processing requirements rather than type of stimulus. (Author/JDD)

The effects of different types of feedback in computer assisted instruction were studied in 30 college students with different cognitive styles. The program, written in Apple Pilot and administered on an Apple IIE microcomputer, consisted of 16 problem solving tasks; for each, a graphic display and a textual question were presented. Two feedback…