When children with Down's syndrome and normally developing children of comparable mental age were compared in their ability to find things they saw in a mirror, it was found that the ability of children with Down's syndrome paralleled that of normally developing children, but that motivational, attentional, and exploratory differences may exist.…

Effects of learning names for random nonsense shapes prior to a probe-type serial-recall task were investigated in disabled readers. No differences among reading groups on recall strength of primary recall were found, suggesting similar verbal skills. (Author)

Preferential looking at stimuli varying in temporal frequency was examined in 11 prematurely born infants. The relationship between amount of looking and stimulus frequency yielded a significant linear trend with the fastest frequency used (4 hertz) being most preferred. (Author/DB)

Television producers, across all types of programming, assume young viewers can parallel process simultaneously presented messages. For instance, television news producers appear to believe that young viewers can attend to weather icons, lexical news crawls, and sports scores while they also attend to news anchors who present the news.…

Objective: To test if visual focusing and mimic display as features of self-regulation in ADHD children show a curvilinear relation to rising methylphenidate (MPH) doses. To test if small dose steps of 2.5mg MPH cause significant changes in behavior. And to test the relation of these features to intellectual performance, parents' ratings, and…

An evaluation of selective generalization of habituation on the basis of meaningful categories of stimuli. Also explored are the sex differences in conceptual generalization of habituation. Subjects were 36 toddlers with a mean age of 40 months. (SDH)

To determine whether Downs Syndrome (DS) persons' recall could be improved by procedures that minimized auditory and visual distractions during auditory memory tasks, 16 DS, 12 non-DS mentally retarded and 12 non-mentally retarded persons (mean ages 16, 16, and 5 years, matched for mental age) listened to, looked at, and tried to remember digit…

Thirty-six newborn infants were exposed to a visual stimulus until habituation was demonstrated; subjects were then presented with the same target or one of either moderate or large discrepancy from the standard stimulus. Following habituation, female infants displayed greater recovery of attention to moderate stimulus change. (SDH)

This experiment examines extended learning over a 4-day period in infants exposed to responsive and unresponsive wooden mobiles. Frequency of kicks and attention to the mobile increased over the first three days and was found to vary with the introduction of a novel mobile on day four. (GO)

Two studies examined the role played by stimulus affective characteristics in determining children's patterns of visual selection. (Editor)

A previous study found that 5-year-old children of schizophrenic mothers were impaired on visual attention tasks as compared with controls. No difference was observed in 6-year-olds, however. This study reexamined the attentive behavior of some of these children 3 years later. (Editor)

This paper summarizes a series of studies investigating the nature of children's attention to television. In a study of distraction, children's visual attention was found to be affected by distractions in the environment, by the nature of the program and by the viewer's own patterns of attending. A study of the general patterns of attention to…