Central and peripheral vision in early infancy

The size of the effective visual field during the first weeks of life is found to depend on two factors: It increases with age, but it contracts in the face of competition from ongoing activity such as fixation of a central stimulus or non-nutritive sucking.     

Imagery and associative memory in children

Second and sixth graders, ages 7–8 and 11–12, respectively, were presented with lists of pairs of nouns. They were asked to represent each pair in memory as a single interactive image, as two separate images, or by a control procedure. After presentation of the pairs, the children were tested either by cued or noncued recall. The difference between the interaction condition and the other conditions appeared in recall measures which reflect pairwise organization in memory (cued recall, pair recall, conditional recall probabilities, and χ²) to a much greater extent than in measures of individual item recall. The results were interpreted as supporting an imagery-organization hypothesis.     

Memory aids in reality orientation: a single-case study

A single-case study of retraining both verbal and behavioural orientation in an 84-yr-old patient with senile dementia is described. In contrast to the traditional approach of employing RO sessions in which verbal learning and subsequent free recall is employed, the patient was provided with a watch and a diary containing personalized information and a daily behavioural itinerary. Results suggest that such memory aids can increase orientation and when effective use of these aids becomes the target of a specific behavioural training then purposive behaviour can be engineered.     

A LISP program to determine similarity relations in letter displays

Similarity relations between letters are important in displays used in tacbistoscopic recognition experiments. A LISP program is described that calculates similarity relations on the basis of an empirical letter-similarity matrix or on the basis of feature sharing in a feature-set definition supplied by the user. With either derivation method, there are three options for the type of average to be calculated for target display: (1) the average for the whole target, (2) the average for each letter in the target paired to all other letters in the target, and (3) the average of each letter in the target paired with its immediate neighbors.     

Second-order isomorphism of internal representations of familiar faces

Following a suggestion by Shepard and Chipman (1970), photographs and names of 15 well-known faces were used as stimuli in judgments of similarity. Ss ranked all pairs of stimuli in terms of facial similarity either from memory when presented with pairs of names, or from photographs. There was a highly significant positive correlation between these two types of judgment. A simple classificatory analysis of the 15 faces in terms of the physical features provided evidence that judgments based on the internal representation of the faces utilized pictorial information. These results extend the generality of Shepard and Chipman’s findings and confirm the usefulness of an approach to the problem of mental images based on the concept of second-order isomorphism.     

Additivity of components of prismatic adaptation

Ss pointed with each hand at a light or at the unseen toe and looked in the direction of the unseen toe before, during, and after training one arm to point to a visual target which was progressively displaced to one side by a prism. Results show that a proprioceptive change in the trained arm is a universal component of the adaptation. When a change in the eye-head system occurs, it and the proprioceptive change in the arm sum to the total adaptation and it is accompanied by a predictable degree of intermanual transfer of the adaptation, as a felt-position theory of adaptation would predict. However, when there is no change in the eye-head system, the proprioceptive shift is not always sufficient to account for the total adaptive shift.