William Healy (1869-1963): pioneer child psychiatrist and criminologist

William Healy, M.D., a pioneer psychiatrist and criminologist, established the first child guidance clinic in the United States in 1909, and was an early advocate of both the "team approach" and the "child's own story" in treatment and research. One of the founders and the first president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Healy helped introduce Freudian thought into the United States. Among his contributions to the field of criminology are his book The Individual Delinquent (1915) and his "multifactor theory" of delinquency, which broadened the field and moved it away from European criminology's stress on genetic factors. Healy developed an elaborate methodology for the complete study of the offender by a variety of specialists. He was also a reformer in the field of corrections, based on his investigations of several institutions for delinquents.     

Sensory modalities in depth perception by golden hamsters

Golden hamsters are able to detect differences in the height of a platform from which they jump, as measured by their increasing latencies prior to jumping from increased elevations. This ability is very effective when optical information is available, but it is also present when hamsters jump in total darkness. A second experiment shows that, when hamsters are placed on a real physical cliff, they preferentially use tactile information over visual information to guide their choice of the side from which to descend. In a nonvisual setting, tactile stimulation is used in conjunction with other types of cues. Evidence is provided to suggest that these cues are of an acoustical nature.     

Cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely born preschoolers

This study was designed to determine possible differences in the cognitive, perceptual, and personal-social development of prematurely and maturely born 3-yr.-olds which might foreshadow later learning problems. The subjects were 40 prematurely born graduates of a neonatal intensive care unit (birth weight less than 2,500 gm, less than 37 wk. gestation) matched on the pair-level with full-term controls on sex, race, post-conceptual age, and socioeconomic background. All subjects were singletons and parity was matched at the group level. No differences were found between the groups on tests of higher mental processes including the General Cognitive, Verbal, Quantitative, and Memory Scales of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities, and researcher-devised measures of problem-solving competence. No differences in parental reports of personal-social development were noted. Prematures did not perform as well as controls on perceptual performance tasks, and this difference was interpreted as reflecting relatively impaired visual-motor coordination.