A group of 28 former pupils of Special Schools for the EMR was tested both in childhood and at adult age. Information about the subjects' situation as children was available from the local school files. Pupils who had experienced the most serious problems as children were less retarded at adult age than persons who had experienced few or none problems. Three persons with impaired hearing showed also a marked increase in I.Q. scores. The results may give support to Clarke's and Clarke's hypothesis that the effects of an early unstimulating environment are not necessarily irreversible.

A group of 41 former slow learners were tested as children and at the age of 30 years. Information about family and personal problems met during childhood was available from the local school files and also by an interview at the age of 30 years. Changes in IQ were associated with the problem score and further education after leaving the compulsory school system. The group of subjects with the greater number of problems and further education improved their IQ scores by 18.1 points, against 5.0 points in the group with one or no problems and without further education.

Rommetveit, R., Toch, H. & Svendsen, D. Effects of contingency and contrast contexts on the cognition of words. A study of stereoscopic rivalry. Scad r. Psychol., 1968, 9, 138–144.—Two typographically very similar words (like ‘hell’ and ‘tell’) were presented in a binocular rivalry situation, each appearing after a contrast context (e.g. ‘heaven’) or a contingency context (e.g. ‘devil’) had been presented to both eyes. Context effect was then assessed in terms of the frequency with which the context‐relevant word was reported as seen. The effect of contrast compared with contingency context was weak when context and test words were presented consecutively, but strong when the context stimulus appeared above the rivalry pair on the same stereogram.

Rommetveit, R., Toch, H. & Svendsen, D. Semantic, syntactic, and associative context effects in a stereoscopic rivalry situation. Scand. J. Psychol., 1968, 9, 145–149.—Typographically similar words (e.g. ‘wine’ and ‘nine’) were presented to left and right eye, each pair in combination with three unequivocal words in such a way that the test word (‘wine’) would appear in either a meaningful phrase (‘sweet wine’), or in an anomalous phrase (‘wrinkled wine’), or in an associated‐words context (‘beer wine’). All three types of context proved effective in making the test word dominate, but anomalous phrase was inferior to the others. A set to ‘read part of a text’ appeared to facilitate the effect of phrase context.

The relationships between occupation, education and intellectual ability at 30 years of age are analysed with particular reference to type of school attended at the age of 14 years. Data utilized are derived from interviews, psychological tests, local files of various schools, and journals of the National Services for Mentally Retarded. The study comprises all live births in the year 1940 of mothers then residing in Bergen, a total of 1570 persons. A sample was taken from this cohort after stratification according to type of school attended at age 14 years. The sample was supplemented with persons who had either attended Special Schools for the educable Mentally Retarded (EMR) or received care from the Services for the Mentally Retarded (SMR). The final sample consisted of 262 persons. A relationship was found for both sexes between type of school attended at the age of 14 years and level of general education at the age of 30. For men, both occupational training acquired and intellecutal ability at 30 years were also clearly related to type of school attended at age 14 years. The test performance of the male group was superior to that of the female group. Differing careers in the two sexes may provide a clue as to the reason underlying this finding.