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…

A study examined the impact of both gender and college experience on judgments of the importance of its factors that determine liking. Seniors and freshmen completed a survey on friend relationships. Participants provided demographic information about a best friend (i.e., where the friend is now, age, and sex), and rated the importance of…

Analyzes the familiarity or distance aspects as well as interest in topics of texts in the light of reader-text interaction. Results found that familiarity and interest with a topic of a text may influence the reading process in terms of evaluation, reader text interaction, and critical reading. (20 references) (Author/VWL)

This study examined bias in intelligibility judgments based on judges' personal familiarity with subjects. Four speech-delayed children (ages four and seven) were audiotaped at intervals during therapy, and intelligibility was assessed by their parents and unfamiliar adults. Mothers were significantly better at identifying words being spoken. An…

This study examined effects of familiarity with a speech target on coarticulation magnitude in 30 young children and 10 adults. Children exhibited a greater effect of a following vowel on the preceding fricative than did adults. Nonmeaningful production items exhibited greater effects of the vowel on the preceding fricative than did meaningful…

Thirty-two subjects (5 Broca's, 7 conduction, and 10 anomic aphasics and 10 normal controls) performed story retell and procedural discourse tasks containing familiar and unfamiliar topics, with familiar and unfamiliar listeners. Results indicated that topic familiarity significantly influenced verbal output in both normal and aphasic subjects.…

Administered a questionnaire focusing on examinees' computer familiarity to 90,000 Test of English as a Foreign Language test takers. A group of 1,200 low-computer-familiar and high-computer-familiar examinees' worked through a computer tutorial and a set of TOEFL test items. Concludes that no evidence exists of an adverse relationship between…

Evaluation of the role of concreteness and familiarity in the development of proverb comprehension in 180 students in grades 5, 8, and 11 found that both concreteness and familiarity as well as student age, influenced comprehension. Results support the "metasemantic" and the "language experience" hypotheses of language comprehension development.…

Investigates the preferences of elementary students for 10 songs selected from the Music Educators National Conference published list of songs, "Get America Singing...Again!," and how song familiarity may be related to song preference. Finds a consistent relationship between song familiarity and preference; grade level, gender, and…

The notion that non-human animals are capable of episodic memory is highly controversial. Here, we review recent behavioral work from our laboratory showing that the fundamental features of episodic memory can be observed in rats and that, as in humans, this capacity relies on the hippocampus. We also discuss electrophysiological evidence, from…

Young infants are very sensitive to feature distribution information in the environment. However, existing work suggests that they do not make use of correlation information to form certain perceptual categories until at least 7 months of age. We suggest that the failure to use correlation information is a by-product of familiarization procedures…

The impact of 2 types of learning experiences on children's perception of multimodal emotion cues was examined. Children (aged 7-12 years) were presented with conflicting facial and vocal emotions. The effects of familiarity were tested by varying whether emotions were presented by familiar or unfamiliar adults. The salience of particular…

Preservice and experienced teachers (N = 58, from 7 universities) wrote lesson plans for a hypothetical beginning band lesson, using one page from a band method book as source material. Lesson plans were analyzed for word count, level of detail, and for strategies that appeared most frequently. Experienced teachers used fewer words than…