Younger (n=40) and older (n=40) adults received information on either familiar or unfamiliar diseases and answered questions about it. Older adults learned less regardless of familiarity or type of memory test. Both older and younger participants learned less new information about familiar diseases. (Contains 30 references.) (SK)

The tendency of two year olds to select an unfamiliar over a familiar object was less when they were asked to choose between items than to identify a referent for an unfamiliar name. This result suggests that children have both an attraction for novel items and a tendency to honor lexical principles. (BC)

In two experiments, preschoolers interpreted a novel count noun applied to an unfamiliar stuffed animal as referring to a basic-level (such as a person or a dog) kind of object rather than to a context (such as a passenger) or a life-phase (such as a puppy) kind of object. (MDM)

Outlines a model of the development of therapists' theoretical orientation and clinical practice, based on the integration of data from 161 Portuguese therapists with the extant literature. Indicates that therapists from different persuasions appear to emphasize different variables. Indicates clinical experience plays a central role, and…

We monitored changes in looking that emerged when 3- to 6-month-old infants were presented with 48 trials pairing familiar and novel faces. Graphic displays were used to identify changes in looking throughout the task. Many infants exhibited strong side biases produced by infants looking repeatedly in the same direction. Although an overall…

This paper considers possible problems researchers might face when interpreting the results of studies that employ variants of the preference procedure. Infants show a tendency to shift their preference from familiar to novel stimuli with increasing exposure to the familiar stimulus, a behaviour that is exploited by the habituation paradigm. This…

In this study, we investigated whether the left and right hemispheres are differentially involved in causal inference generation. Participants read short inference-promoting texts that described either familiar or less-familiar scenarios. After each text, they performed a lexical decision on a letter string (which sometimes constituted an…

A qualitative study of a group of traditionally aged undergraduate students showed their reliance on content relevance and familiarity when making source selection decisions. Credibility, convenience, and format/type were also frequently mentioned criteria. Students' year in school influenced their selection criteria and format preference.

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 30 children with word-finding difficulties (aged 8 to 12 years) had difficulty naming and the types of errors they made on these words. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors that might influence naming performance: word frequency, age of…

A category effect (i.e., living vs. nonliving exemplars) in confrontation naming has been reported in association with various cerebral pathologies. However, the published reports conflict as to the presence of this category effect in normal controls. The present experiment included 90 subjects in three age groups (young, young-elderly, and…

Proofreading a text for misspellings involves detecting spelling errors and then correcting those errors. We examined differences in spelling error detection and correction in adults as a function of type of spelling error. We modified student essays to include phonological (e.g., incredibul), orthographic (e.g., decisian), and morphological…

This article asks what happens to the learning of young children when they work regularly with a professional visual artist in their school. Through Creative Partnerships, a national programme initiated in 2002 to bring creative professionals into schools across England, some school children have had the opportunity for sustained project work with…

Speeded visual word naming and lexical decision performance are reported for 2,428 words for young adults and healthy older adults. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables (e.g., measures of consistency, frequency, familiarity, neighborhood…

This article proposes that visual encoding learning improves reading fluency by widening the span over which letters are recognized from a fixated text image so that fewer fixations are needed to cover a text line. Encoder is a connectionist model that learns to convert images like the fixated text images human readers encode into the…

Three experiments directly compared infants' categorization in variations of the visual familiarization task. In each experiment, 4- or 6-month-old infants were familiarized with a collection of dogs or cats and then their response to novel dogs and cats was assessed. In Experiment 1, 4-month-old infants responded to the exclusive distinction of…