Application of modern technologies, including virtual reality (VR) and eye-tracking (ET), to educational practice has been vigorously researched over the past decade with a focus on enhancing and improving school and university educational process and students' results. The main aim of this technological report is to describe an implementation of…

Virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, have seen remarkable mainstream uptake in the last decade. Such environments have grown from hosting niche interest groups to providing sites for leisure, business and education for tens of millions of Internet users. Concurrently, a multi-disciplinary research field exploring the…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders supposedly have an affinity with information and communication technology (ICT), making it an ideally suited media for this population. Virtual environments (VEs)--both two-dimensional and immersive--represent a particular kind of ICT that might be of special benefit. Specifically, this paper discusses…

The dual-stage two-phase (DSTP) model is introduced as a formal and general model of selective attention that includes both an early and a late stage of stimulus selection. Whereas at the early stage information is selected by perceptual filters whose selectivity is relatively limited, at the late stage stimuli are selected more efficiently on a…

The participation of attentional and associative mechanisms in extinction, spontaneous recovery, external disinhibition, renewal, reinstatement, and reacquisition was evaluated through computer simulations with an extant computational model of classical conditioning (N. A. Schmajuk, Y. Lam, & J. A. Gray, 1996; N. A. Schmajuk & J. A. Larrauri,…

While there has been extensive experimental research on haptics, less has been conducted on cross-modal interactions between visual and haptic perception and even less still on cross-modal applications in instructional settings. This study looks at a simulation on the principles of levers using both visual and haptic feedback: one group received…

Using a connectionist framework, it is possible to develop models exploring effects of biologically relevant variables on behavior. The ability of such models to explain schizophrenic behavior in terms of biological disturbances is considered, and computer models are presented that simulate normal and schizophrenic behavior in an attentional task.…