Cross-modal matching and association under sodium amytal

Anatomical and theoretical considerations, as well as experimental findings, have yielded conflicting points of view regarding the abilities of the right hemisphere in man to accomplish cross-modal transfer of information. Auditory—visual cross-modal matching (CMM) and association (CMA) abilities of the left and right hemisphere (LH and RH) were tested, using the Wada intracarotid sodium amytal technique. It was found that the RH performed slightly better on these tasks than the LH. These findings contrast with results of other techniques which indicate that the RH cannot perform CMM and CMA.     

Multisensory information boosts numerical matching abilities in young children

This study presents the first evidence that preschool children perform more accurately in a numerical matching task when given multisensory rather than unisensory information about number. Three- to 5-year-old children learned to play a numerical matching game on a touchscreen computer, which asked them to match a sample numerosity with a numerically equivalent choice numerosity. Samples consisted of a series of visual squares on some trials, a series of auditory tones on other trials, and synchronized squares and tones on still other trials. Children performed at chance on this matching task when provided with either type of unisensory sample, but improved significantly when provided with multisensory samples. There was no speed–accuracy tradeoff between unisensory and multisensory trial types. Thus, these findings suggest that intersensory redundancy may improve young children’s abilities to match numerosities.     

Cross-modal slant and curvature matching of stereo- and motion-induced surfaces

In many laboratory setups and in many day-to-day situations, a unique solution of the structure-fromtwo-views problem is unobtainable. Yet, when the visual system is presented with two projections in a sequence, it nevertheless appears to generate a reasonably stable percept of structure. In the research reported here, we examined whether the same surface would be perceived when subjects were presented with a pair of views that alternated in time monocularly (two-frame motion) or were shown simultaneously to both eyes (stereo). In Experiment 1, we studiedslant perception: human observers were asked to match the slant of a motion-induced planar surface with its stereo-induced counterpart. In Experiment 2, the perceivedcurvature of parabolic surfaces was matched in a similar way. The results show that motion-induced slant is matched with ahigher value of the stereo-induced slant. However, the curvature experiment showed that motion-induced curvature is matched with alower stereo-induced curvature. One possible explanation may be that the slant and curvature are internally inconsistent in at least one of the modalities.     

Perceptions of proportionality in young children: matching spatial ratios

Three experiments examined the ability of young children (4- and 5-year-olds) and adults to identify correspondences in spatial ratios. In all three experiments, children as young as 4 and 5 years of age made accurate spatial proportionality judgments. Moreover, their judgments were no less accurate when both response alternatives differed in spatial configuration from the sample than when all the configurations were alike, indicating that those judgments were based on relational information and not on the exact form of the stimuli. The findings, which suggest that the concept of ratio may have important foundations in the ways young children perceive relations within and between objects, have implications for theories of mathematical development and for methods of mathematics instruction.     

Deception by young children following noncompliance

A paradigm devised by M. Lewis, C. Stanger, and M. W. Sullivan (1989) was adapted to study deception and false-belief understanding. In Study 1, 3- and 5-year-olds were asked not to touch a toy in the experimenter's absence. Just over half of the children touched the toy, and of those children, the majority denied having done so. Of control children who were given permission to touch the toy, all touched it and admitted having done so. In Study 2, 3- and 5-year-olds were asked not to look in a box to identify its contents. Almost all children looked, most denied having looked, and a minority consistently feigned ignorance of the contents. False-belief understanding was linked to denial of looking but not to feigning ignorance. Of control children who were given permission to look, all acknowledged looking, and they almost always revealed their knowledge of the contents. The studies confirm that preschoolers deceive in the context of a minor misdemeanor but are less effective at feigning ignorance.     

Area-matching strategies used by young children

Across three studies, conditions were varied under which children aged 4–5 years matched the area of a rectangle with a given width (or height) to that of a square. In the first study, subjects observed the rectangle being changed in height from trial to trial and had access to their immediately preceding response. Under these conditions, rectangle width (the dimension under subject control) was a linear decreasing function of rectangle height. This function was interpreted as evidence for a hypothetical addition/subtraction strategy for maintaining equality in area between the comparison rectangle and the standard square. As a test of this hypothesis, in a second experiment the subjects were denied access to their immediately previous response, and in a third study they were also unable to observe the rectangle as it was altered by the experimenter between trials. The purpose of these changes was to remove the information necessary for readily implementing an addition/subtraction strategy. In both studies, area matches seemed to be based on a side-matching strategy, such that subjects matched one dimension of the rectangle to one side of the standard square. It was suggested that young children use different cues or strategies with different variants of the matching task because they do not possess a fixed, specific concept of area.     

The cross-modal matching of brightness to loudness by children

According to Stevens' explanation of cross-modal matching, the recruitment-like effects of masking seen in intramodal loudness judgements should be reflected in a brightness-to-loudness matching task. In an experiment with child observers, this failed to occur. The results are explicable in terms of category mediation of the cross-modal, but not the intramodal, task. In support of this account, it is shown that cross-modal judgements are unaffected by explicit category mediation. However, intramodal judgements, explicitly mediated in the same way, produce a pattern of results similar to those obtained in the cross-modal task. The experiments suggest that cross-modal matching does not provide a useful test of loudness recruitment in the bilaterally hearing impaired.     

Discrimination of mirror-image shapes by young children

Experiments were conducted to examine the difficulty six-year-old children have in discriminating visually between a shape and its lateral reversal, relative to the difficulty in discriminating between a shape and its inversion. Contrary to results with simultaneous presentation, under successive presentation there was no difference between the difficulty of discriminating lateral reversals and difficulty of discriminating inversions. This was also the case for successive presentation with trial-to-trial variation in position of shapes. Spatial adjacency of the shapes to a reference feature of the visual background accounted for the variations in difficulty between discrimination of lateral reversals and discrimination of inversions which obtained under simultaneous presentation.     

Haptic object matching by blind and sighted adults and children

The present study describes a tactual object matching task based on the study of Lederman and Klatzky (1987) for the dimensions Exact shape, Weight, Volume and Texture. Participants were congenitally blind children and their sighted classmates, congenitally blind adults and sighted adults. To study a possible effect of familiarity the task was performed four times. Based on Millar's CAPIN (Convergent Active Processes in Interrelated Networks) model of spatial processing (Millar, 1994) it was thought that this manipulation would add redundant information to the experiment from which the children and blind participants could benefit. The results showed that accuracy was affected more by age than visual status, especially for the dimension Exact Shape. With regard to response times, children were in most cases faster than adults, especially the sighted adults. Familiarization had a significant effect on response times for all dimensions. Extra exercise only increased accuracy for the dimension Texture. These results were generally in line with the CAPIN model.     

Representational drawings of solid objects by young children

Two groups of children aged 6 and 8 years were given three tasks requiring graphical representations of solid geometric forms. These tasks were drawing from life models, copying from photographs, and copying from line drawings of these objects. Performance was assessed on the basis of level of approximation to correct perspective. Older children used more perspective features than younger children in their drawings. At all ages, the drawings from life were most difficult. Results on the two copying tasks were not consistent. Drawings made by copying photographs were either as advanced as or poorer than copies of line drawings. The results are explained in terms of the difficulties exhibited by young children in translating the three-dimensional scene to a two-dimensional picture plane and strategies adopted by them to cope with these problems.     

Discrimination of spatially confusable letters by young children

A study of the ability of young children to discriminate spatially confusable letters using four different methods of discrimination (matching, copying, naming, and writing to dictation) was carried out. The subjects were 31 English children whose ages ranged from 5 years 6 months to 6 years 10 months. The test material consisted of 10 spatially confusable letters, i.e., letters whose differential features depend upon their spatial orientation: p, q, d, b, u, and n, and to a lesser extent h and y and w and m. The results show that the accuracy of discrimination of spatially confusable letters is dependent upon the method of assessment employed. The highest accuracy is achieved when the method requires copying confusable letters from a given sample, followed by the method that requires matching a given letter with other possible alternatives. Naming the confusable letters and writing them in response to dictation are the most difficult tasks to perform. The results also indicate that there is a significant correlation between individual performances in the matching, naming, and writing to dictation tests; but in the copying task individual performances varied independently of the performances in the other tests. Some theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Imitation of hierarchical action structure by young children

To provide the first systematic test of whether young children will spontaneously perceive and imitate hierarchical structure in complex actions, a task was devised in which a set of 16 elements can be modelled through either of two different, hierarchically organized strategies. Three-year-old children showed a strong and significant tendency to copy whichever of the two hierarchical approaches they witnessed an adult perform. Responses to an element absent in demonstrations, but present at test, showed that children did not merely copy the chain of events they had witnessed, but acquired hierarchically structured rules to which the new element was assimilated. Consistent with this finding, children did not copy specific sequences of actions at lower hierarchical levels.     

Spoken word recognition by young children and adults

The nature of the stimulus information that is important for the recognition of auditorily presented words by young (5-year-old) children and adults was studied. In Experiment 1, subjects identified and rated the extent of noise disruption for words in which white noise either was added to or replaced phoneme (fricative and nonfricative) segments in word-initial, -medial or -final position. In Experiment 2, subjects identified words as acoustic-phonetic information accumulated either from their beginnings or ends with silence or envelope-shaped noise replacing the nonpresented parts. The results point to developmental similarities in the derivation of phoneme identities from impoverished sensory input to support the component processes of recognition. However, position-specific information may play a less prominent role in recognition for children than for adults.