The infant's acquisition of knowledge of bimodally specified events

Four-month-old infants viewed, for a duration of several minutes, two objects that bounced in synchrony with two percussion sounds. This synchrony was the only information tying each sound to its respective object. During the viewing the infants learned about the relationships between sound and object. Learning was revealed in two ways. In a search test, infants looked for an object when its sound was played. In a transfer test, infants' declining interest in a sound presented alone generalized to the visible object that the sound specified. Studies that reversed the spatial locations of the objects revealed that sound-object learning, rather than place or response learning, guided infants' perceptual exploration.     

The effect of a commercial game on children's block design scores on the WISC-R IQ test

Two experiments investigated the extent to which 10-year old children's scores on the WISC-R Block Design subtest were affected by prior experience with a specific commercial game that involved blocks and matching patterns. Experiment 1 found that 12 10-year old children who happened to have experience with the particular commercial game scored approximately three scaled score points higher on the WISC-R Block Design subtest than 24 matched children without game experience. In Experiment 2, 24 children who did not have prior experience with this particular commercial game were randomly assigned either to a Game condition (involving two 15-minute sessions with the game) or to a No-Game condition (which involved no further game experience). Children in the Game condition subsequently increased their WISC-R Block Design scores more than children in the No-Game condition. Taken together, the experiments indicate that relatively brief interactions with a commercial game can cause a significant improvement in children's performance on an IQ subtest.     

Free recall by deaf and hearing children: semantic clustering and recall in trained and untrained groups.

Free recall tasks with semantically categorizable stimuli were given to 60 deaf and 60 hearing children, divided equally among Grades 3, 5, and 7 (ages 9, 11, and 13 years, respectively). Half the children were trained to use semantic categorization as a memory aid after the first study-test trial. All subjects were told category labels and sizes on the third recall trial. As hypothesized, older children showed more spontaneous semantic clustering and higher recall scores than younger children. Training increased clustering in all groups, while the provision of category information at retrieval increased clustering regardless of training condition. Contrary to expectations, deaf children used semantic clustering as much as hearing children. Deaf children's recall scores, however, were significantly lower than hearing children's. The specific contrasts observed between deaf and hearing children's performance suggest that deaf children's recall deficiencies probably reflect either inadequate knowledge of category membership or inflexibility in reclassifying individual items, rather than a general inability to recognize and use the categorical nature of a list as a mnemonic aid.     

A test of the X-linked genetic hypothesis for sex differences on Piaget's water-level task

Data from seven studies involving 849 high school and college students were used to test the recessive X-linked genetic model prediction that the square of the proportion of men who perform accurately on the water-level task is equal to the proportion of women who perform accurately. Goodness-of-fit tests showed that this prediction was confirmed for each sample. A model with a single estimate of gene frequency accounted for all the data when a classification error parameter was incorporated into the X-linked model. In both models the gene frequency parameter was about $\text{2}\text{3}$.     

Commentary on social class differences in sociodramatic play in historical context: A reply to McLoyd

Historical origins of the research on the cultural correlates of imaginative behavior by the Israeli psychologists Feitelson, Smilansky, and Eifermann are presented. It is argued that despite McLoyd's searching analysis of the deficiencies in studies which attempt to relate level of imaginative play to social class, those earlier cross-cultural studies, together with some 50 years of prior research on social class and play in general, provide a context which gives support to those studies despite their particular methodological deficiencies.     

Synesthesia: II. Psychophysical relations in the synesthesia of geometrically shaped taste and colored hearing

The psychophysical function in two synesthetic subjects, one with geometrically shaped taste and the other with colored hearing, is investigated. Each synesthete is compared with three control subjects. Pilot studies are used to construct appropriate response domains. Compared to controls, synesthetes give a restricted set of responses that are also asymmetric with respect to the range of choices available in various subsets of the response domain. A combination of absolute and relative effects is also distinctive of synesthetic percepts. It is concluded that synesthesia is a distinct phenomenon unlike ordinary mediated associations, and occupies an intermediate position in the range of simple to complex brain mechanisms.