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Providing elderly persons with understandable information with which they can make informed health care decisions is a difficult, yet critical, task. Four methods of enhancing understanding of the Resident's Bill of Rights were evaluated in residents of the board and care section of a long-term care facility. The methods included the use of large print and simplified language, a storybook, and a videotape. There was no significant improvement for performance on the comprehension test after any of the methods of presentation of the Bill of Rights. A number of subjects were found to be very deficient in short term memory or in verbal knowledge. When these subjects were eliminated from the analyses, significant improvement was demonstrated with the simplified version of the Bill of Rights yielding the most improvement. These findings indicate that many elderly people can benefit from an informed consent procedure that provides information clearly and simply. Furthermore, with relatively simple cognitive screening procedures, it should be possible to identify those unable to process the information necessary to participate in common health care decisions.

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Infants aged 8-16 days were shown a small ball, a picture of a ball, and a homogeneous stimulus card. Their reaching behavior was scored for each stimulus condition. a reach was defined using the following 3 criteria: (1) lateral extension of the arm, (2) arcing movement of the arm toward midline, and (3) flexion of the arm toward the upper half of the body. The mean rates of reaching per minute for the ball, the picture, and the homogeneous or blank card were 2.94, 2.78, and 1.83, respectively. t tests showed significant differences between the ball and blank-card conditions (p less than .002) and between the picture and blank-card conditions (p less than .007), but not between the ball and picture conditions. Thus, arm movements resembling reaching can be visually elicited in neonates, but they are elicited as readily by 2-dimensional as by 3-dimensional stimuli. Furthermore, infants do not refrain from reaching when a large central area of their visual field is blank. These results suggest only that the probability of reaching-like behavior is increased by the presence of a patterned visual stimulus.

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Two experiments are reported that tested the effects of crawling-onset age, the amount of crawling experience, and testing age on avoidance of the deep side of a visual cliff apparatus by human infants. In Experiment 1, 49 infants ranging in age from 7 to 13 mo. were tested on the visual cliff after 1 or 2 mo. of crawling experience. Discriminant analysis revealed that crawling-onset age, and not crawling experience, discriminated between those infants who crossed and those infants who avoided the apparent drop-off. Infants who crossed the deep side were infants with an early crawling-onset age. In Experiment 2, 40 infants were tested on a visual cliff apparatus, half at 9 and half at 12 mo. of age. Discriminant analysis again found that crawling-onset age discriminated between infants who crossed the infants who would not cross the deep side, whereas testing age alone did not. These results call into question the idea that experience crawling is critical in inducing visually guided avoidance behavior in infants. It is argued that the crawling-onset age effect occurs because crawling during the tactile phase of infancy interferes with later visual control of locomotion.

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22 infants 6.7--12.3 months old were tested on a visual-cliff apparatus both crawling and in a walker. Experience with the walker ranged from 0.5 to 4.5 months; experience crawling from 0.1 to 4.8 months. A multivariate analysis of latencies to full support and to reach the mother showed a significant interaction between cliff side and type of locomotion. Latencies on the deep side were longer when crawling than when in the walker. Age and experience factors were examined as predictors of avoidance and nonavoidance behavior in the crawling condition. Stepwise discriminant analyses chose "age when first crawled" as the best predictor of avoidance behavior. While experience crawling was a significant predictor when entered into the analysis first, greater experience crawling predicted nonavoidance behavior. Further analysis suggests that the effect of experience was not independent of age when first crawled. These results argue for a maturation-based explanation of cliff avoidance and against an explanation in terms of reafferent information produced by experience locomoting.

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Piaget's description of object concept development is based on success in performing a series of search tasks. However, failure to perform successfully may result from undeveloped aspects of the cognitive or motor system unrelated to a concept of objects. This study examined the role of perceptual-motor development in a typical Stage IV task by comparing performance given a standard cloth cover or a small card cover. Subjects were 10 infants 147--187 days old (median age = 160 days). A pass was defined as the retrieval of the toy within 30 sec on 2 out of 3 trials. The difference in performance between the 2 cover conditions was significant (p = .032). These results advise caution in interpreting Stage IV performance in terms of a developing object concept.

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