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The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of cursive handwriting programs in improving letter legibility and form in third-grade students without identified handwriting problems. Four months into the school year, cursive handwriting was assessed for a sample of convenience of 50 third-grade students. Subsequently, students received instruction for 10-15 minutes daily for 6 weeks using either Handwriting without Tears, Loops and Other Groups programs, or, as a control condition, continued instruction in the Zaner-Bloser program. Student handwriting for all programs improved from pretest to posttest. Posttest comparisons indicated no significant differences between programs. The results suggest that the method of handwriting instruction has a limited short-term impact on cursive letter legibility and form for children without handwriting problems. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

Principal-component analyses of 4 face-recognition studies uncovered 2 independent components. The first component was strongly related to false-alarm errors with new faces as well as to facial 'conjunctions' that recombine features of previously studied faces. The second component was strongly related to hits as well as to the conjunction/new difference in false-alarm errors. The pattern of loadings on both components was impressively invariant across the experiments, which differed in age range of participants, stimulus set, list length, facial orientation, and the presence versus absence of familiarized lures along with conjunction and entirely new lures in the recognition test. Taken together, the findings show that neither component was exclusively related to discrimination, criterion, configural processing, featural processing, context recollection, or familiarity. Rather, the data are consistent with a neuropsychological model that distinguishes frontal and occipitotemporal contributions to face recognition memory. Within the framework of the model, findings showed that frontal and occipitotemporal contributions are discernible from the pattern of individual differences in behavioral performance among healthy young adults. Keywords: face recognition, false recognition, individual differences, recognition memory, principalcomponents analysis DOI: 10.1037/a0016368