Children with complex communication needs often have multiple disabilities including visual impairments that impact their ability to interact with aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems. Just as the field benefited from a consideration of visual cognitive neuroscience in construction of visual displays, an exploration of…

It is imperative that teachers have the knowledge and resources to support children who are deaf and use a cochlear implant in general education classrooms. The recommendations presented in this article provide teachers with the information necessary to promote a child's academic progress, communication needs, and social development. In order to…

A fundamental issue in the design and the interpretation of experimental studies of perception relates to the question of whether the participants in these experiments could perform the perceptual task assigned to them using another feature, or cue, than that intended by the experimenter. An approach frequently used by auditory- and…

Some aspects of Chinese literacy development do not conform to patterns of literacy development in alphabetic orthographies. Four are highlighted here. First, semantic radicals are one aspect of Chinese characters that have no analogy to alphabetic orthographies. Second, the unreliability of phonological cues in Chinese along with the fact that…

Special education professionals and teachers of students with autism face many behavioral and instructional challenges. In addition to teaching content to a demanding population, teachers are often faced with particular circumscribed and special interests that often take up time and divert attention from the students. It is an educators job to…

A dynamic interactive theory of person construal is proposed. It assumes that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial, vocal, and bodily cues. This system permits lower-level…

Reading and teaching "Don Quijote" present multiple challenges to twenty-first century students and instructors who are culturally and historically distanced from the seventeenth century. With "Las Meninas" serving as a visual lexicon for cuing correlative themes and events in "Don Quijote", the instructor, through an ekphrastic, interdisciplinary…

We taught 2 children with visual impairments to select a coin from an array using tactile cues after hearing its name and then to select a coin after hearing its value. Following the acquisition of these listener (receptive language) skills, we then observed the emergence of speaker (expressive language) skills without direct instruction.…

A growing number of studies claim that spatial attention can be split "on demand" into several, segregated foci of enhanced processing. Intrigued by the theoretical ramifications of this proposal, we analyzed 19 relevant sets of experiments using four methodological criteria. We typically found several methodological limitations in each study that…

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to…

Rapamycin, an inhibitor of the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) kinase, has attracted interest as a possible prophylactic for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-associated fear memories. We report here that although rapamycin (40 mg/kg, i.p.) disrupted the consolidation and reconsolidation of fear-potentiated startle paradigm to a…

Theoretical accounts of both speech perception and of short term memory must consider the extent to which perceptual representations of speech sounds might survive in relatively unprocessed form. This paper describes a novel version of the serial recall task that can be used to explore this area of shared interest. In immediate recall of digit…

People perceive and conceive of activity in terms of discrete events. Here the authors propose a theory according to which the perception of boundaries between events arises from ongoing perceptual processing and regulates attention and memory. Perceptual systems continuously make predictions about what will happen next. When transient errors in…

Level-invariant detection refers to findings that thresholds in tone-in-noise detection are unaffected by roving-level procedures that degrade energy cues. Such data are inconsistent with ideas that detection is based on the energy passed by an auditory filter. A hypothesis that detection is based on a level-invariant temporal cue is advanced.…

All babies communicate. It is through communication that relationships are formed and sustained. All parents must learn how to interpret and respond to their baby's communications in order to form the bonds that become the foundation for development. When a child has both a visual impairment and hearing loss, however, it may be more difficult to…