Perceptual and Motor Skills

31 trainable mentally retarded children were divided into lateralized and mixed-dominant groups and were then tested for their ability to perform a spatial task requiring short-term memory and reversible visual imagery. Retarded children with inconsistent and crossed laterality patterns were better in visual-spatial ability than retarded children whose sided preferences were unilateral in eye, hand, ear and foot modalities. The results support the developmental importance of bilateral sensory and motor functioning.

The concept of dyslexia is both important and ambiguous. In an effort to reduce the ambiguity of the concept, several hundred second-grade school children were tested for primary reading errors and for two non-reading characteristics often mentioned as signs of dyslexia. Through analyses based in large part on the logic of mixed-group validation (Dawes & Meehl, 1966), confusion in identification of left and right was implicated as a sign of dyslexia, and crossed hand-eye dominance was tentatively rejected as one. Thus, severe reading errors and directional confusion appear intertwined as components of dyslexia. Moreover, the study provided some support for the conceptual and practical potentials of the logic on which it was based.

Healthy men ( n = 42) and women ( n = 45) who were right-handed and men ( n = 21) and women ( n = 20) who were left-handed were studied. Men's mean age was 21.1 ±3.5 yr. and women's 20.7 ± 3.1 yr. These students in various faculties reported they were right- or left-handed. Then their hand and foot preferences (handedness and footedness) were ascertained by asking each of the subjects to perform 11 tasks for handedness and 9 tasks for footedness. A discriminate function analysis test showed that each of the 11 tasks used for assessing their self-reported handedness was significant, but, of the 9 tasks used for assessing self-reported footedness, only 7 were significant. Strength of the hand or foot played no role in reports of handedness or footedness. A combination of four tasks, such as pulling a door, pushing a door, holding an object, and hammering a nail, on which the maximum number of subjects performed with the right or left hand, depending upon their self-reported handedness, would be ideal for ascertaining handedness. A combination of three tasks, namely, kicking a football, pushing an object with the foot, and stamping on the ground, would be ideal for ascertaining footedness.

Available literature provides ample evidence that there are basic responses which are elicited by stimuli but which are independent of sense-modality distinctions. Everyday observations of intermodality associations, studies of synesthesia and of physiological reactions to different stimuli, and semantic differential studies all showed evidence of such primary responses. Semantic differential studies, in particular, have shown that human judgments of diverse samples of stimuli can be characterized in terms of three dimensions: evaluation, activity, and potency. We have termed the corresponding emotional responses pleasure, arousal, and dominance. Simple self-report measures of these emotional reactions were developed by using questionnaire studies in which Ss described a variety of situations using semantic-differential type scales.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between exercise enjoyment and participant's perceptions of selected characteristics of the exercise instructor and exercise class. Women ( N = 296) attending aerobics classes at a university fitness center were surveyed. Analysis yielded significant correlations among exercise enjoyment and the four characteristics of instructor and five for classroom. Correlations ranged from .16 to .32. Stepwise regression analysis was also conducted. Three of the nine characteristics entered into the model: (1) instructor's personal fitness, (2) instructor's ability to communicate instruction, and (3) liking of other participants in the class. The three variables combined accounted for only 17% of the variability for enjoyment of exercise.

Although upper limb movements are known to be slower and more variable in elderly persons, the extent to which these changes are associated with deficits in movement-related sensory feedback is poorly understood, despite the importance of proprioception in the control of skilled movement. Age-related changes were examined with 22 participants (10 of M age 27 years and 12 of M age 75 years) in performance of an elbow position-matching task which varied in terms of interhemispheric transfer and/or the need to retrieve memory-based proprioceptive information. Matching errors were significantly greater, and movements more prolonged, and irregular in their time course in the elderly group than in the young group. Impaired performance in conditions requiring interhemispheric transfer and retrieval of memory-based proprioceptive information reflected the importance of cognitive processing during complex sensorimotor tasks. This novel matching paradigm provided a sensitive means of manipulating the demands of the task and may be an effective method for as sessing both cognitive and sensorimotor declines associated with aging.

We investigated the transfer of an arm-positioning movement between the right and left arms of right and left handers. 30 male (15 strong right handers and 15 strong left handers) subjects were asked to perform a constrained criterion movement, 12 cm in length, with right or left arm and a test movement at estimated 6-, 12-, or 24-cm length with the contralateral arm. In the right handers, the constant error of the left arm test movement was near zero, and that of the right arm indicated overshooting. In the left handers, the constant errors of the left arm test movement were farther from zero than those of right arm test movement. Left handers as well as right handers showed manual asymmetry on positioning movement. A plausible explanation for the manual asymmetry on the arm-positioning task is related to interhemispheric transfer of spatial information on positioning movement.

Data from 30 female subjects indicated that a 17.3% increase in a physical fitness index improved by 12% to 68% the information processing and decision-making capabilities of the subjects. The changes in physical fitness did not affect the performance on a variety of other tasks.

Societal attitudes toward obese persons are predominantly negative, and many health care professionals share these beliefs. This study compared attitudes toward obese persons of 67 US nurses to those of 107 Canadian nurses. Also, attitudes toward obesity were examined as a particular class of prejudice. A positive correlation was hypothesized between ethnic prejudice and prejudice regarding obese persons. Significant differences in attitudes toward obese patients were observed between the two groups on several questionnaire items, and the hypothesis was confirmed by the moderate r of .53 for US nurses. A surprising finding was a new target of ethnic prejudice: the Caucasian majority.