Spalding Gentlemen’s Society holds, among its varied collections of William Stukeley papers, a virtually unknown set of forty-four important drawings dating from 1720–64. It is an intimate collection closely connected with Stukeley and his immediate family: portraits, his houses and gardens in Lincolnshire and Kentish Town, and a few miscellaneous family history papers. Originally, the collection was bound into an album which, as the latest drawing dates from the year before Stukeley’s death, was almost certainly compiled post mortem by a family member. For many years the collection was lost, but recent investigation has revealed that c 1866–7 it was purchased by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart., and sold at auction in 1910. It has been in Spalding ever since, arriving at the Spalding Gentlemen's Society possibly about 1950. Cataloguing the collection was recently undertaken by this author and the enhanced significance given by this and the revealed provenance enabled the Society to apply successfully to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a grant towards conservation and storage. The great value of the collection is that it hugely increases our knowledge of Stukeley’s houses and gardens, particularly his garden works, and illuminates the evolution of Stukeley’s thoughts on garden design.

One of the main outstanding problems in keyword mnemotechnics is whether this technique is more effective when the subjects generate their own keywords, or when the keywords are supplied by the experimenter. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages. An alternative method has recently been suggested, in which the keywords are generated by the subjects' peers. In the present study we aimed to investigate whether immediate or delayed recall are affected by keyword generation method (experimenter or peer generation). We also aimed to determine whether the method of keyword generation affects imaging capacity as evaluated by questionnaires or spatial tests. A total of 377 secondary-school students were selected and divided into four groups. All subjects were presented with 30 Latin words. Additionally, the subjects in Group 1 were presented with bizarre images, while the subjects of Group 2 were presented with normal images, in both cases representing the keywords selected by peers as interacting with the Latin words. The subjects in Groups 3 and 4 were likewise presented with normal or bizarre images, respectively, but representing the keywords selected by the experimenters. The subjects' imaging capacity was evaluated by means of the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) and the Spatial Test of Primary Mental Abilities (ST-PMA). The results were analysed by multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) with three factors (ST-PMA imaging capacity, 2 levels; VVIQ imaging capacity, 2 levels; and mnemotechnic method, 4 levels) and dependent variables immediate recall and delayed recall. All three factors influenced recall. Subsequent univariate analyses of variance indicated that subjects with high ST-PMA score and subjects with high VVIQ score showed better immediate and delayed recall than subjects with low ST-PMA score and subjects with low VVIQ score. Mnemotechnic method (i.e. whether keywords are generated by the experimenter or by peers) significantly affected immediate recall but not delayed recall.

The authors present and interpret rock drawings found in caves in the Lenggong Valley, Perak, Malaysia. The drawings, which begin by depicting ritually important patterned mats, and continue with images of cars, bicycles and figures with their hands on their hips, provide rare and precious insights into how the indigenous people of the area came to terms with changes that occurred as the result of the arrival of Europeans in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

We describe a method for constructing a structural model of an unlabeled target two-dimensional line drawing by analogy to a known source model of a drawing with similar structure. The source case is represented as a schema that contains its line drawing and its structural model represented at multiple levels of abstraction: the lines and intersections in the drawing, the shapes, the structural components, and connections of the device are depicted in the drawing. Given a target drawing and a relevant source case, our method of compositional analogy first constructs a representation of the lines and the intersections in the target drawing, then uses the mappings at the level of line intersections to transfer the shape representations from the source case to the target; next, it uses the mappings at the level of shapes to transfer the full structural model of the depicted system from the source to the target.

Children with specific language impairment (LI) have deficits on some nonverbal tasks, but it is not clear if these are related to specific visuospatial deficits or to more general deficits in processing strategies. Children with LI were given two visuospatial tasks that we have shown to be sensitive to strategy use as well as specific processing deficits. In Study 1, children with LI (N = 29, ages 6 to 12 years) performed significantly worse than typically developing children (N = 26) on the Hierarchical Forms Memory task. In Study 2, children with LI (N = 15; ages 9 to 12 years) performed significantly worse than typically developing children (N = 40) on the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure task. Children with LI were less accurate and tended to use a fairly piecemeal (immature) strategy when copying the figure and were less likely to draw the core rectangle in a more integrated fashion during the immediate memory condition. These results suggest children with LI have subtle deficits on visuospatial tasks that may be more indicative of limitations associated with processing load and planning than of specific visuospatial processing deficits (JINS, 2006, 12, 465–474.)

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during recognition tasks for line drawings (items) or for both drawings and their spatial locations (sources). Recognized drawings elicited more positive ERPs than new drawings. Independent of accuracy in the spatial judgment, the old/new effect in the source recognition task was larger over the prefrontal scalp, and of longer temporal duration than in the item recognition task, suggesting that the source memory task engaged a qualitatively distinct memory process. More posterior scalp sites were sensitive to the accuracy of the source judgment, but this effect was delayed relative to the difference between studied and unstudied drawings, suggesting that source memory processes are completed after item recognition. Similarities and differences between spatial source memory and memory for conjunctions of other stimulus attributes are discussed, together with the role of prefrontal cortex in memory.

In November 1943, one of Barbara Hepworth’s daughters (Sarah, one of triplets) developed osteomyelitis of the thigh. This necessitated operation and subsequent treatment at the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Centre in Exeter by Mr. Norman Capener. Artist and surgeon subsequently became friends and she encouraged his activities as a ‘weekend sculptor’. At his invitation she came to the hospital in November 1947 watching him in out-patients but more particularly in the operating theatre; other visits to London and Exeter followed. These studies of orthopaedic procedures form the great majority of Hepworth’s sixty-plus hospital drawings/paintings but there is also a small group of six paintings involving an operation on the ear made in April and May 1948. The link between these two and the introduction to the ear surgeon, Mr Garnett Passe, is unclear.

Five of the paintings of the ear operation are still in circulation but there is also a sketchbook containing no fewer than 28 drawings. A selection of the sketches together with the fenestration series of paintings will be discussed and also the relationship with the surgeon, Mr Garnett Passe.