Development of sensitivity to static pictorial depth information

Sensitivity to the pictorial depth cues of shading, linear perspective, and position on the picture plane were investigated with children from 3 to 7 years of age as well as with adults. Using a discriminative learning method, all Ss were found to be sensitive to shading information for depth when the display was oriented vertically, but not when it was oriented horizontally. In addition, binocular view did not decrease sensitivity relative to monocular view. Linear perspective was found to be effective in controlling 3-year-olds’ size discriminations of equal-area figures, while position on the picture plane was ineffective in the absence of other information for depth.     

Piagetian measures of cognitive development for children up to age two

This paper proposes a measure of cognitive development which is based primarily on Piaget's concepts. The choice of the particular items was determined by their assumed relation to general representational ability, including linguistic and nonverbal communication abilities. The present approach is distinguished from those of some linguists who suggest that a child's early linguistic development is not compatible with his cognitive skills and, thus, that a child's grammatical competence implies the existence of some innate set of principles for the generation of language. In contrast, the present approach hypothesizes that a child's cognitive skills during the first 2 years, particularly nonverbal representational abilities, not only precede but enhance his subsequent acquisition of language. The assumption that the items of the proposed scale together test a common ability was supported by a multidimensional homogeneity analysis of the scale, which indicated that it defines an essentially unitary ability dimension and also has strong ordinal characteristics.This study was supported by U.S. Public Health Service Grant MH 13509. This is an updated version of a paper that was presented at the International Days of Sociolinguistics, 1969, Rome, Italy.     

Some referents and measures of nonverbal behavior

This paper summarizes some of the measures of nonverbal behavior that have been found to be significant indicators of a communicator’s attitude toward, status relative to, and responsiveness to his addressee. The nonverbal cues considered include posture, position, movement, facial, and implicit verbal cues. In addition to providing criteria for the scoring of these cues, experimental findings that relate to the various cues are summarized.     

Contingency awareness,partial reinforcement effects,and curiosity motivation in children

Third- and fourth-grade children were given a two-choice discrimination learning task, designed to associate each of three syllables with a different reward schedule: 100% reward, 50% reward, and 0% reward. Subsequent to the conditioning phase, measures were made of the subject's awareness of the reward contingencies associated with the syllables, as well as the pleasantness and curiosity which these syllables had acquired during the conditioning. The results showed that a partially rewarded cue was evaluated as somewhat less “pleasant” than a continuously rewarded cue, but evoked more “curiosity” than either the continuous or nonrewarded cues. These effects emerged only for the contingency aware groups.     

Prayer

Pastoral Psychology -