Scanning for reversed and rotated targets

Children and adults scanned arrays of identical shapes for mirror reversed or 180° rotated targets. The decomposition of scanning time into ‘target identification time’ and ‘context scanning time’ indicated that it takes longer to identify reversed than rotated targets but that it takes equally long in both conditions to scan context. This confirms the notion of a specific difficulty in coding mirror reversed shapes.When the shapes used contained vertical lines, ‘scanning time’ increased while ‘target identification time’ was unaffected. This is probably due to a tendency to fixate lines at right angles to the direction of scan and does not reflect a coding difficulty.     

The comprehension of relative,absolute, and contrastive adjectives by young children

Three types of adjectives-relative, contrastive, and absolute-were presented in standard and comparative contrasts to preschool children in a picture-choice paradigm. Proportion of errors in picture choices showed the predicted effect of greater difficulty for comparative than for standard terms. Latency data showed that the responses to comparative forms of absolute and contrastive adjectives were significantly slower than responses to their standard forms, and were also slower than responses to the comparative forms of the relative terms which did not differ from their standard forms. These data support the interpretation that the classes of relative, contrastive, and absolute adjectives are processed differently by young children. Factors of cognitive complexity that influence the order of difficulty are considered.     

Trial of piracetam in children with cerebral organic mental deficiency]

The administration, in a double blind experiment, of piracetam to two homogeneous groups of 32 and 34 eight- to twelve-year-old brain-injured special education children lacking normal mental ability, where the daily doses administered for a period of thirteen weeks were 3 tablets or 1.2 g (administered to second and third graders) and 5 tablets or 2.0 g (administered to fourth graders), respectively, did not produce a lasting effect upon the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, the concentration power, the proficiency level, and the behavior shown by pupils during and out of school hours. On the other hand, there was observed, in patients receiving placebos, a nonsignificant tendency toward improvement in physical well-being, so that the effect produced by the drug may here be considered to be a negative one.     

Emotional reaction to past and future events as a function of temporal distance

In three experiments with 30 Ss, imagined past and future events were used as stimuli. Scales were constructed by the ratio estimation method for (a) subjective temporal distance and (b) emotional reaction to the events. It was found (1) that subjective temporal distance was a power function of chronological distance, (2) that emotional reaction to past events could be described as an exponential function of subjective temporal distance; a simple relation thus exists between the two psychological variables, whereas emotional reaction is related in a more complicated way to the objective variable, and (3) that emotional reaction to future events could be described about as well by a power function as by an exponential function of both subjective and objective temporal distance.