This investigation examined the development of young children's behaviors on swings in the outdoor play environment and their emerging understanding of the physics principles associated with those behaviors. The children's language interactions were also examined in an effort to determine the relationship between language and cognitive development in their construction of physical knowledge. The procedures involved observing the children's behaviors and collecting samples of their spontaneous language interactions during their swinging activities. Informal interviews were also conducted with individual and groups of children. The findings indicate that young children's swinging behaviors develop in eight hierarchical stages. As these behaviors develop, children experiment with the physics principles of balance, gravity, force, resistance, and resonance. Children's swinging behaviors develop in a social context. Many early behaviors are acquired through observing and modeling other children. Language provides the medium for more-experienced peers to assist novice swingers through encouragement and direct instruction. The stage development of swinging behaviors is compared to Cratty's Theory of Perceptual-Motor Development and Harrow's Taxonomy of the Psychomotor Domain. Children's cognitive processing and language interactions are discussed in the context of Piagetian and Vygotskian theories of development. Implications for instruction and suggestions for further research are discussed.

The overall purpose of this research was to add to existing theory of quality pertaining to the service provider's perception of quality. Quality in the service industry is difficult to assess because of the intangible, heterogeneous and labor intensive nature of services. In addition, personnel have varying perceptions of delivered quality based on their position within the organizational hierarchy. This study enhanced the Service Quality Model developed by Zeithaml, Berry, and Parasuraman (1988). An additional gap ("gap 6") was hypothesized and investigated. This gap describes the differences in perceived delivered quality by employees at different organizational levels (e.g., managerial, supervisory, and non-management employees) across different market segments. The researcher proposed that "gap 6" has a significant impact on total perceived delivered quality. The survey instrument addressed five dimensions of overall quality: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The survey was administered to employees from hotels representing three market segments located within the same metropolitan area and managed by the same company. A 3 X 3 factorial design was used with three organizational levels (managers, supervisors, and hourly employees) and three lodging market segments (luxury, business-traveller, and long-term/suite). Data analyses included descriptive statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and Tukey's Multiple Comparison Test.

Researchers who make predictions from educational data are interested in choosing the best regression model possible. Many criteria have been devised for choosing a full or restricted model, and also for selecting the best subset from an all-possible-subsets regression. The relative practical usefulness of three of the criteria used in selecting a regression model was compared in this study: (a) Mallows' C_p, (b) Amemiya's prediction criterion, and (c) Hagerty and Srinivasan's method involving predictive power. Target correlation matrices with 10,000 cases were simulated so that the matrices had varying degrees of effect sizes. The amount of power for each matrix was calculated after one or two predictors was dropped from the full regression model, for sample sizes ranging from n = 25 to n = 150. Also, the null case, when one predictor was uncorrelated with the other predictors, was considered. In addition, comparisons for regression models selected using C_p and prediction criterion were performed using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988.

The purpose of the present study was to compare the scores of the Beck Depression Inventory, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and the Coopersmith Inventory of heterosexual men with compulsive sexual behavior (N = 22), homosexual men with compulsive sexual behavior (N = 19), heterosexual men without compulsive sexual behavior (N = 38), and homosexual men without compulsive sexual behavior (N = 8). The Sex Addiction Screening Test was used to determined placement in a group. Findings revealed men who exhibit compulsive sexual behavior are significantly more depressed, experience lower self-esteem and have higher state anxiety (situational) than controls.

Reitan and Wolfson's General Neuropsychological Deficit Scale and Left and Right Neuropsychological Deficit Scales were applied to Halstead-Reitan test data of individuals with psychotic or substance abuse disorders with and without a head injury.

Information systems research tends to ignore individual differences in users. This laboratory experiment sought to illuminate contributions of decision-makers' cognitive processes to decision outcome as reflected in four hypothesis sets: the impact of imagery preference and presentation format upon (HI) recall accuracy and upon hemispheric activation during (H2) encoding and (H3) recall, and (H4) to examine the relationship between hemispheric activation differences and accuracy differences. Point-value (specific values) and intraset-pattern (relationships between values) recall were considered. Thirty MBA students, grouped by imagery preference (cognitive style) as favoring verbal (textual) or visual (graphical) information presentation, performed computer-based recall tasks using tabular and graphical formats in a repeated measures design. Hemispheric activation (cognitive process) was assessed using ratios of EEG activity in six frequency bands captured from six pairs of homologous electrode sites during encoding and recall.

Eighty-three species of vascular plants were inventoried on the prairie relict during peak dickcissel nesting. Based on foliar cover and occurrence frequency, the five dominant plants were heath aster (Aster ericoides), eastern gammagrass (Tripsacum dactyloides), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), sensitive briar (Schrankia roemeriana) and meadow dropseed (Sporobolus asper). Sixty-one percent of dickcissel nests were constructed on or immediately next to three plant species: eastern gammagrass, sensitive briar and green milkweed.

This thesis examines a collection of three songs, "In Flanders Fields," "He Is There!," and "Tom Sails Away," written by Charles Ives in 1917, from primarily a literary perspective involving Transcendentalism and intertextuality. Ives's aesthetic builds upon the principles of Transcendentalism. I examine these songs using the principles outlined by the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists, and Ives's interpretations of these beliefs. Another characteristic of Ives's music is quotation. "Intertextuality" describes an interdependence of literary texts through quotation. I also examine these songs using the principles of intertextuality and Ives's uses of intertextual elements. Familiarity with the primary sources Ives quotes and the texts they suggest adds new meaning to his works. Transcendentalism and intertextuality create a greater understanding of Ives's conflicting views of the morality of war.

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship of separation-individuation during late adolescence and obstacles to career decision making.

Representing time has been considered a general problem for artificial intelligence research for many years. More recently, the question of representing time has become increasingly important in representing human decision making process through connectionist expert systems. Because most human behaviors unfold over time, any attempt to represent expert performance, without considering its temporal nature, can often lead to incorrect results. A temporal feedforward neural network model that can be applied to a number of neural network application areas, including connectionist expert systems, has been introduced. The neural network model has a multi-layer structure, i.e. the number of layers is not limited. Also, the model has the flexibility of defining output nodes in any layer. This is especially important for connectionist expert system applications. A temporal backpropagation algorithm which supports the model has been developed. The model along with the temporal backpropagation algorithm makes it extremely practical to define any artificial neural network application. Also, an approach that can be followed to decrease the memory space used by weight matrix has been introduced. The algorithm was tested using a medical connectionist expert system to show how best we describe not only the disease but also the entire course of the disease. The system, first, was trained using a pattern that was encoded from the expert system knowledge base rules. Following then, series of experiments were carried out using the temporal model and the temporal backpropagation algorithm. The first series of experiments was done to determine if the training process worked as predicted. In the second series of experiments, the weight matrix in the trained system was defined as a function of time intervals before presenting the system with the learned patterns. The result of the two experiments indicate that both approaches produce correct results. The only difference between the two results was that compressing the weight matrix required more training epochs to produce correct results. To get a measure of the correctness of the results, an error measure which is the value of the error squared was summed over all patterns to get a total sum of squares.