Purpose: The current study examined the role of attention and language ability in nonverbal rule induction performance in a demographically diverse sample of school-age children. Method: The participants included 43 English-speaking monolingual and 65 Spanish-English bilingual children between the ages of 5 and 9 years. Core Language Index…

A prominent theory of category learning, COVIS, posits that new categories are learned with either a declarative or procedural system, depending on the task. The declarative system uses the prefrontal cortex (PFC) to learn rule-based (RB) category tasks in which there is one relevant sensory dimension that can be used to establish a rule for…

Individuals regularly experience fluctuations in the ability to perform cognitive operations. Although previous research has focused on predicting cognitive flexibility from persistent individual traits, as well as from spontaneous fluctuations in neural activity, the role of learning in shaping preparatory attentional control remains poorly…

The effect of education on children with autism serves as a relative cure for their deficits. As a result of this, they require special techniques to gain their attention and interest in learning as compared to typical children. Several studies have shown that these children are visual learners. In this study, we proposed a Visual Hybrid…

Intuitively, dynamic visual stimuli, such as moving objects or flashing lights, attract attention. Visual search tasks have revealed that dynamic targets among static distractors can indeed efficiently guide attention. The present study shows that the reverse case, a static target among dynamic distractors, allows for relatively efficient…

Training over a 6-month period in which a moderately retarded 10-year-old was asked to direct his attention to simulus properties on a visual level resulted in significant improvement in concept development, social comprehension, and understanding of instructions. (CL)

Young infants have repeatedly been shown to be slower than older infants to shift fixation from a midline stimulus to a peripheral stimulus. This is generally thought to reflect maturation of the neural substrates that mediate the disengagement of attention, but this developmental difference may also be attributable to young infants' slower…

Letter pairs that could not be distinguished by learning disabled children were presented using an acquisition-reversal learning paradigm. Relevant external stimuli facilitated discrimination; in reversal, the cues were irrelevant. This technique facilitated learning, as well as retention four days later. (Attentional deficits are discussed). (GDC)

The influence of verbal and written labels on selective attention to visual materials was examined with retarded children. Under treatment conditions, retarded and normal children located an object more quickly, looked at it longer, and recognized more objects on a recognition-memory task. These results may be applied to materials development.…

This study investigated potential effects of auditory and other communicative experience on development of visual attention in 80 infants (tested at 9, 12, and 18 months), half deaf and half with deaf mothers. Results indicate that early visual attention is associated with and potentially influenced by a complex interaction of maturation,…

A cue-target visual attention task was administered to 25 children (ages 10-12) with dyslexia. Results showed a general pattern of slower responses in the children with dyslexia compared to controls. Subjects also had longer reaction times in the short and long cue-target interval conditions (covert and overt shift of attention). (Contains…

Experimenter presence (representing external control) or absence during task presentation were the two conditions under which attentional performance of 16 hyperactive and 16 control subjects (ages 7-12) was assessed. Results suggested noncompliance (an application deficit rather than an ability deficit) as a major contributor to poor performance…