Career awareness and personal development: a naturalistic study of gifted adolescent girls' concerns

The role of social interaction and the importance of humor in the development of gifted adolescent females' beliefs about career options are explored in this paper. Findings are based on a qualitative study which utilized participant-observation and interviewing during a four-month career exploration seminar for gifted females. The results of this study indicate that gifted girls experience a unique conflict between expectations directed at gifted students, and their status as females. The use of humor functioned as a coping device to promote relaxation and release tension.     

Reconstructing from a degraded trace: A study of sentence repetition in agrammatism

Six agrammatic aphasics repeated simple active and passive voice sentences, varying in degree of semantic constraint: plausible, reversible, and implausible. Frequency of correct response was not sensitive to this semantic manipulation, but error pattern was. In general, errors to plausible targets consisted of relatively inconsequential transformation of the open or closed class vocabulary, while errors to implausible targets implicated a change of syntactic voice. In making these errors, the patients displayed evidence of productive control of the passive morphology and a degree of sensitivity to the syntactic and thematic consequences consequences of passive voice. The repetition errors did not transform the surface order of the major lexical items. The results are interpreted as evidence for a sentence memory trace that preserves, minimally, the major grammatical roles of the target sentence and that serves as input to a reconstructive process that is biased toward the production of semantically plausible sentences.     

Spatial cuing in a stereoscopic display: Evidence for a “depth-aware” attentional focus

Two experiments were conducted to explore whether attentional selection occurs in depth, or whether attentional focus is “depth blind,” as suggested by Ghiradelli and Folk (1996). In Experiment 1, observers viewed stereoscopic displays in which one of four spatial locations was cued. Two of the locations were at a near-depth location and two were at a far-depth location, and a single target was presented along with three distractors. The results indicated a larger cost in reaction time for switching attention inx,y and depth than inx,y alone, supporting a “depth-aware” attentional spotlight. In Experiment 2, no distractors were present, similar to the displays used by Ghiradelli and Folk. In this experiment, no effect for switching attention in depth was found, indicating that the selectivity of attention in depth depends on the perceptual load imposed on observers by the tasks and displays.     

Perceptual grouping in space and time: Evidence from the Ternus display

We report three experiments investigating the effect of perceptual grouping on the appearance of a bistable apparent-motion (Ternus) display. Subjects viewed a Ternus display embedded in an array of context elements that could potentially group with the Ternus elements. In contrast to several previous findings, we found that grouping influenced apparent motion perception. In Experiment 1, apparent motion perception was significantly affected via grouping by shape similarity, even when the visible persistence of the elements was controlled. In Experiment 2, elements perceived as moving without context were perceived as stationary when grouped with stationary context elements. In Experiment 3, elements perceived as stationary without context were perceived as moving when grouped with moving context elements. We argue that grouping in the spatial and temporal domains interact to yield perceptual experience of apparent-motion displays.     

Teaching problem solving skills to teachers-in-training: An analogue experimental analysis of three methods

This analogue study sought to determine the relative effectiveness of different instructional methods for teaching problem solving skills to teachers-in-training. Three instructional conditions (didactic, didactic + modeling, and didactic + modeling with rehearsal/feedback) and a control condition were compared on measures of problem identification and problem analysis. Results indicated that the didactic + modeling and didactic + modeling with rehearsal/feedback conditions were superior to didactic training in teaching problem-solving skills. Discussed are possible explanations for differences between the instructional conditions, the implications of these findings, limitations of this study, and directions for further teacher-training research in problem solving.     

Buffalo Creek Survivors in the Second Decade: Comparison with Unexposed and Nonlitigant Groups1

This study investigated the second-decade effects of the Buffalo Creek dam collapse and flood that occurred in West Virginia in 1972. One hundred twenty-one survivors who had participated in an earlier lawsuit against the coal company that built the collapsed dam were compared to 78 nonlitigant survivors on self-reported symptoms, clinical ratings, and diagnoses. A nonexposed sample from a geographically and culturally similar neighborhood was investigated as well. Findings showed no differences between the litigant and nonlitigant survivor groups. The survivor groups together showed higher rates of anxiety, depression, and hostility symptoms and diagnoses than the nonexposed sample. The findings were discussed in the context of the nature of the traumatic event, social and cultural influences on recovery, and the constellation of symptoms which differentiated the groups.     

The TMS 9918A VDP: A new device for generating moving displays on a microcomputer

A procedure for creating smooth and continuous moving displays on a microcomputer using the TMS 9918A video display processor (VDP) is discussed. This processor shares all of the features of other VDPs and, in addition, enables the user to directly program smooth motion of specified graphics shapes (sprites) with multilevel pattern overlaying. The general principles for programming this video chip are described, and a machine language driver is presented. Three illustrative applications from the event perception literature—wheel-generated motion, kinetic disruption of optical texture, and biomechanical motions—are presented as demonstrations of how the unique features of this video chip can be implemented in the creation of dynamic displays.