It has been reported that visual statistical learning (VSL) is facilitated in skewed distributions. However, it remains unclear whether enhancement of VSL in Zipfian distributions is due to consciousness of the regularities presented at high frequency. This study addressed this issue. We measured participants' subjective confidence in regularities…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Online learning environments are challenging for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) individuals. A major concern is split attention, which occurs when one simultaneously attends to multiple stimuli, a situation that characterizes most multimedia presentations and instruction that combines sound, text, images, graphs or charts, and video. Needing to…

Understanding the relationship between cognitive processing and learner performance on tasks using digital media has become increasingly important as the transition towards online learning programs increases. Determining the impact of implementation of instructional resources is often limited to performance outcomes and comparisons to the status…

Linguistic and non-linguistic pattern learning have been studied separately, but we argue for a comparative approach. Analogous inductive problems arise in phonological and visual pattern learning. Evidence from three experiments shows that human learners can solve them in analogous ways, and that human performance in both cases can be captured by…

Background: Chromosome 22q11.2 microdeletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) is a genetic syndrome characterised by a unique cognitive profile. Individuals with the syndrome present several non-verbal deficits, including visual memory impairments and atypical exploration of visual information. In this study, we seek to understand how visual attention may…

This study investigated visual statistical learning (VSL) in 24 deaf signers and 24 hearing non-signers. Previous research with hearing individuals suggests that SL mechanisms support literacy. Our first goal was to assess whether VSL was associated with reading ability in deaf individuals, and whether this relation was sustained by a link between…

Visuals play an important role in the teaching and learning of science and should be embedded within and supportive of authentic science inquiry. Both researchers and teachers believe that visuals have a great deal of potential to help students understand science, but in practice, these visuals do not always live up to their promise. Teachers need…

This study explored the causes of the reverse modality effect when learning from multimedia instruction. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups (visual text or spoken text). The findings revealed a reverse modality effect wherein that those studying visual text outperformed those studying spoken text on three assessments. Further…

Visual input is frequently disrupted by eye movements, blinks, and occlusion. The visual system must be able to establish correspondence between objects visible before and after a disruption. Current theories hold that correspondence is established solely on the basis of spatiotemporal information, with no contribution from surface features. In…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate rapid automatized naming skills (RAN) and immediate memory processes in 243 Chinese Mandarin-speaking elementary readers (ranging from Grade 1 to Grade 5). For RAN subtests, the mean naming time decreased monotonically with grade level in good and average readers, and a similar trajectory was found in poor…

Recent research indicates that infants first use form and then surface features as the basis for individuating objects. However, very little is known about the underlying basis for infants' differential sensitivity to form than surface features. The present research assessed infants' sensitivity to luminance differences. Like other surface…

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…

The authors present a comprehensive consideration of the process characteristics of visual search in contexts that vary in their meaningfulness. The authors frame hypotheses regarding process architecture, stopping rule, capacity, and channel independence, using analytic results and a rigorously specified dynamic system to characterize a set of…

Suggests that it is sometimes useful to consider information as being encoded as images, sometimes as language, and sometimes as propositions, and describes research that provides evidence of processing in all these forms. (Author)