Video instruction has been widely studied and is generally considered as effective as live instruction for teaching scientific concepts and procedures. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of prerecorded videos for teaching more challenging content. This study conducted a controlled experiment on over 300 high school students to…

We compared maternal speech in interactions of mothers with their firstborn dizygotic twin and singleton infants. Nine twins and nine singletons were video-recorded at home in spontaneous face-to-face interactions with their mothers, from the 2nd to the 6th month. Continuous micro-analysis revealed that there are more quantitative and qualitative…

Evidence regarding the benefits of an instructor's deictic gestures in video lectures on adults' learning may not necessarily be reflective of their effect on children's learning. Furthermore, there is a lack evidence regarding how deictic gestures specifically affect learners' learning process. Based in cognitive load theory, with consideration…

Recent advances in eye-tracking technology afford the possibility to collect rich data on attentional focus in a wide variety of settings outside the lab. However, apart from anecdotal reports, it is not clear how to maximize the validity of these data and prevent data loss from tracking failures. Particularly helpful in developing these…

Visual attention in complex, dynamic scenes is attracted to locations that contain socially relevant features, such as faces, and to areas that are visually salient. Previous work suggests that there is a "global shift" over development such that observers increasingly attend to faces with age. However, no prior work has tested whether…

Research Findings: Reading e-books is becoming common even among toddlers, but we have limited understanding of how parents-toddlers reading e-books together compares to print books. To address the gap, we investigated interactions of 30 mother-toddler (12 months) dyads, in particular, mothers' language use, while reading both electronic and print…

Effects of "joint attention" were addressed on 3- to 4-year-olds' performance in a verbal false-Belief Test (FBT), featuring the experimenter as co-watcher rather than narrator. In two experiments, children (N = 183) watched a filmed-FBT jointly with a test leader, disjointed from a test leader, or alone. Children attending jointly with…

How does viewers' knowledge guide their attention while they watch everyday events, how does it affect their memory, and does it change with age? Older adults have diminished episodic memory for everyday events, but intact semantic knowledge. Indeed, research suggests that older adults may rely on their semantic memory to offset impairments in…

Over the last 2 centuries there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of children who grow up in cities. However, relatively little work has explored in detail the physiological and cognitive pathways through which city life may affect early development. To assess this, we observed a cohort of infants growing up in diverse settings across…

With the technological improvements of innovative portable recording gadgets, augmented researchers' interest in exploring students' visual attention in their natural and normal occurring classrooms. The purpose of this study was to gauge students' visual attention in their Mathematics and English classrooms. This article reports on a study…

The present study investigated the potential benefits of extended exposure to captioned videos for second language pronunciation. We tested 90 L2 adult learners of English on speech processing skills (segmentation, speed of lexical access, and sentence processing) and phonological accuracy in perception (ABX discrimination) and production…

Given the dependent nature of parent-infant interactions necessary for language development, it is important to understand how context may influence these interactions. This study examines how contextual variables influence communicative, cognitive and social measures of parent-infant interactions. Specifically, how do feedback toys and…

The use of a second screen can enhance information processing and the execution of search tasks within a given period. In this study, we examined the learner's attentional shift (AS) between two screens and controlled secondary tasks (STs) in the media multitasking setting and its effect on the learning process. In particular, we analyzed how…