Manual exploratory behaviors during object interaction that form the basis of tool use behavior, are mostly qualitatively characterized in terms of their frequency and duration of occurrence. To fully understand their functional and clinical significance, quantitative movement characterization is needed alongside their qualitative analysis.…

Words influence cognition well before infants know their meanings. For example, three-month-olds are more likely to form visually based categories when exemplars are paired with spoken words than with sine-wave tones, a likely precursor to learning symbolic relations between words and their referents. However, it is unclear why words have these…

Research on video activity detection has primarily focused on identifying well-defined human activities in short video segments. The majority of the research on video activity recognition is focused on the development of large parameter systems that require training on large video datasets. This dissertation develops a low-parameter, modular…

Motion is a universal concept in common human perception. In the word system of a language, verb is inherently a very complex real word, both in terms of grammar and semantics, that complexity is due to the influence of the semantics of this word. However, in most of the previous studies, the authors often only focused on studying single word…

This study explores how feature salience and feature centrality influence inductive generalization in 4- and 5-year-old children and adults. Recent reports indicate that enhancing the salience of a feature--specifically, a creature's head--by making it move shifts children's inductions so that they ignore labels and make inferences that are…

Purpose: Using data from children who spoke various nonmainstream dialects of English and who were classified as either children with specific language impairment (SLI) or typically developing (TD) children, we examined children's marking of infinitival TO by their dialect and clinical status. Method: The data came from 180 kindergartners (91…

Evidence has shown that student's attention is a crucial factor for engagement and learning gain. Although it can be accurately assessed ad-hoc by an experienced teacher, continuous contact with all students in a large class is difficult to maintain and requires training for novice practitioners. We continue our previous work on investigating…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed (a) to provide a classification of the ventricular-fold dynamics during voicing, (b) to study the aerodynamic impact of these motions on vocal-fold vibrations, and (c) to assess whether ventricular-fold oscillations could be sustained by aerodynamic coupling with the vocal folds. Method: A 72-sample…

We have investigated whether and how a categorization of responses to questions on linear distance-time graphs, based on a study of Irish students enrolled in an algebra-based course, could be adopted and adapted to responses from students enrolled in calculus-based physics courses at universities in Flanders, Belgium (KU Leuven) and the Basque…

Plants are a huge and diverse group of organisms, ranging from microscopic marine phytoplankton to enormous terrestrial trees epitomized by the giant sequoia: 300 feet tall, living 3000 years, and weighing as much as 3000 tons. For this plant issue of "CBE-Life Sciences Education," the author focuses on a botanical topic that most…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to explore how Chinese preschool children categorize plants into either living or nonliving things. The research was framed within the interpretive paradigm and was designed as a descriptive, cross-sectional study. Participants were children 4 to 6 years of age from 3 kindergartens in Jiangsu…

Attentional capture is an unintentional shift of visuospatial attention to the location of a distractor that is either highly salient, or relevant to the current task set. The latter situation is referred to as contingent capture, in that the effect is contingent on a match between characteristics of the stimuli and the task-defined…

The aim of the current study is to investigate motion event cognition in second language learners in a higher education context. Based on recent findings that speakers of grammatical aspect languages like English attend less to the endpoint (goal) of events than do speakers of nonaspect languages like Swedish in a nonverbal categorization task…

The present study seeks to expand the current focus on acquisition situations in linguistic relativity research by exploring the effects of nativisation (the process by which a L2 is acquired as a L1) on language-specific cognitive behaviour. Categorisation preferences of goal-oriented motion events were investigated in South African speakers who…

The encoding of goal-oriented motion events varies across different languages. Speakers of languages without grammatical aspect (e.g., Swedish) tend to mention motion endpoints when describing events (e.g., "two nuns walk to a house") and attach importance to event endpoints when matching scenes from memory. Speakers of aspect languages…