A comparison of the effects of methylphenidate (Ritalin) and response cost in reducing the offtask behavior of two boys (7 and 8 years old) with attentional deficit disorders and hyperactivity revealed that response cost (with free time as the reinforcer) was superior to Ritalin in increasing ontask behavior and improving academic performance.…

The Goldman Lock Box provides two measures of self-regulation, planfulness and maintenance of goal-directed behavior. Lock Box performance of 25 children with down syndrome was compared with that of 43 typically developing children, matched for mental age. Children in both groups showed similar levels of competence, planfulness and…

The study of four autistic children, aged six-nine, found support for the hypothesis that persistent pronominal errors by autistic children can be explained by failure to observe pronouns in speech addressed to another person, an aspect of language development in normal children. (Author/DB)

Adolescents identified letters presented to them on the basis of color. Subjects (n=20) with mental retardation exhibited facilitation when the target was identical to the target on the preceding trial but did not exhibit inhibition when it had been a distractor on the preceding trial. Inefficient suppression processes may result in performance…

The introduction to this special issue on preschool issues in autism summarizes the other papers, which focus on general issues, development of attention and imitation during the preschool years, nonverbal communication of young children with autism, and instructional techniques. (DB)

Two experiments examined age differences in children's dual-task performance. Findings indicated that when capacity for single-task performance was controlled, age differences between second and fifth graders did not exist in performance of dual-tasks of equal priority. When tasks had different priorities, only fifth graders could differentially…

Attentional allocation in feature-search mode (W. F. Bacon & H. E. Egeth, 1994) is thought to be solely determined by top-down factors, with no role for stimulus-driven salience. The authors reassessed this conclusion using variants of the spatial cuing and rapid serial visual presentation paradigms developed by C. L. Folk and colleagues (C. L.…

Four experiments explored the task span procedure: Subjects received lists of 1-10 task names to remember and then lists of 1-10 stimuli on which to perform the tasks. Task span is the number of tasks performed in order perfectly. Experiment 1 compared the task span with the traditional memory span in 6 practiced subjects and found little…

The purpose of the present study was to replicate and extend to word recognition previous findings of reduced magnitude and reliability of laterality effects when exogenous cueing was used in a dichotic listening task with syllable pairs. Twenty right-handed undergraduate students with normal hearing (10 females, 10 males) completed a dichotic…

Eye movements latencies toward peripherally presented stimuli were measured in 10-year-old dyslexic and control children. Dyslexic subjects, previously found to be oversensitive to stimulation of the magnocellular channel, showed reduced latencies as compared to normally reading controls. An attention shifting task was also used which showed no…

Pragmatic development requires the ability to use linguistic forms, along with non-verbal cues, to focus an interlocutor's attention on a referent during conversation. We investigate the development of this ability by examining how the use of demonstratives is learned in Turkish, where a three-way demonstrative system ("bu,"…

Special education, elementary school students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD) were investigated for neuropsychological deficits with the NEPSY battery. Over half (54%) scored two or more standard deviations below the test mean on at least one of the four functional domains, especially Language and Attention/Executive Functions. The NEPSY…

In 118 children followed from age 2 to 5 (59 with autism, 24 with PDD-NOS and 35 with non-spectrum developmental disabilities), age 2 and age 3 scores of non-verbal ability, receptive communication, expressive communication and socialization were compared as predictors of receptive and expressive language at age 5. Non-verbal cognitive ability at…

As cognitive architectures move to account for increasingly complex real-world tasks, one of the most pressing challenges involves understanding and modeling human multitasking. Although a number of existing models now perform multitasking in real-world scenarios, these models typically employ customized executives that schedule tasks for the…

Poorer performance in conditions involving task repetition within blocks of mixed tasks relative to task repetition within blocks of single task is called mixing cost (MC). In 2 experiments exploring 2 hypotheses regarding the origins of MC, participants either switched between cued shape and color tasks, or they performed them as single tasks.…