Recent data indicate that the familiarity and the emotional expression of faces occur at an early stage of information processing. The goal of the present study was to determine whether these two aspects interact at the structural encoding stage as reflected by the N170 component of event-related potentials in tasks requiring the subjects either…

We directly compared chimpanzee infants and human infants for categorical representations of three global-like categories (mammals, furniture and vehicles), using the familiarization-novelty preference technique. Neither species received any training during the experiments. We used the time that participants spent looking at the stimulus object…

The present study examined whether school psychologists who serve a single school ("In-House" group) differed from school psychologists who serve several schools concurrently ("Traditional" group) in the three areas of job satisfaction, burnout, and effectiveness as perceived by the school psychologist. A total of 63 school psychology…

Instructors who teach in online learning environments have the unique opportunity to enhance the interaction of their students through an online threaded discussion board. With effective planning and skillful facilitation techniques, this venue for posting messages can be used as a resource to engage learners in becoming an interactive and…

Four-year-olds were tested for their ability to use differences in the spacing among features to recognize familiar faces. They were given a storybook depicting multiple views of 2 children. They returned to the laboratory 2 weeks later and used a "magic wand" to play a computer game that tested their ability to recognize the familiarized faces…

This study aimed to facilitate students' entrance to an introductory cell biology course for biology majors. The most prominent difficulty in this introductory course, is students' poor background-knowledge, such as a lack of understanding of very basic concepts and terms, and the huge differences in students' background knowledge. In order to…

Movements such as the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002) together with the United Nations declaration of The Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD), 2005-2014 should see the increasing need for reorientation of the role of education within the sustainability agenda. Malaysia, unlike other nations, does…

Examined children's and adults' perceptions of facial stimuli that were either systematically exaggerated (caricatures) or de-exaggerated (anticaricatures) relative to a norm face. Found that all ages perceived caricatures as the most distinctive version and anticaricatures as least distinctive; the smallest effect was for 6-year-olds. Caricatures…

Examined geographical representations among children and young adults. Found that a distinct home region was apparent at age 9. At age 11, children divided North America into regions the same as university students. Children used new location information to update location estimates. Children preserved ordinal structure of initial location…

To assess script-based knowledge and performance of routine events, 20 mentally retarded adults and 20 nonretarded preschoolers were asked to sequence photographs of events. Retarded individuals were better able to sequence events depicted in familiar contexts than in novel contexts. (Author/JDD)

Children's knowledge of the use of objects helped determine whether children's actions indicate their understanding of the functional use of objects independent of their ability to verbally describe the object or its function. Found that older children made fewer phenomenism errors but that the majority were still able to show the function of the…

The role of partner familiarity in the organization, duration, and content of social pretend play was studied in a triadic situation involving two friends and a third familiar child. Findings showed that play between friends was longer and richer than play with the third partner and that girls spent nearly twice as much time in fantasy as boys.…

Findings of four investigations involving five through seven year olds suggest that, even though children can make relatively accurate judgments of their knowledge states, they tend to overestimate their competence when assessing their knowledge in relation to performance on a task. (RH)

Two experiments examined the effects of a culture-general factor, pattern redundancy, on the discrimination of five-tone melodies that differed in their adherence to Western tonal conventions, among 9-month olds, 5-year olds, and adults. Increasing exposure seemed to attenuate the effects of the pattern redundancy while amplifying the influence of…

Reactions to peers' distress were recorded for 52 toddlers (hosts), 18 to 36 months old, who were observed playing with familiar peers in their own homes during 2 sessions, 6 months apart. Four contextual factors were explored: the host's responsibility for the guest's distress, similarity between the toddler and the distressed peer, relative…