Many studies have shown that children with autism spectrum disorder have some understanding of intentions behind others' goal-directed actions on objects. It is not clear whether they understand intentions at a high level of abstraction reliant on the context in which the actions occur. This study tested their understanding of others' prior…

When children hear a novel word in a context presenting a novel object and a familiar one, they usually assume that the novel word refers to the novel object. In a series of experiments, we tested whether this behavior would be found when 2-year-olds interpreted novel words that differed phonologically from familiar words in only 1 sound, either a…

Learning from visual representations is enhanced when learners appropriately integrate corresponding visual and verbal information. This study examined the effects of two methods of promoting integration, color coding and labeling, on learning about probabilistic reasoning from a table and text. Undergraduate students (N = 98) were randomly…

Atypical gaze processing has been reported in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Here we explored how infants at risk for ASD respond behaviorally to others' direct gaze. We assessed 10-month-olds with a sibling with ASD (high risk group; n = 61) and a control group (n = 18) during interaction with an adult. Eye-tracking revealed less…

Previous word learning studies suggest that children with autism spectrum disorder may have difficulty understanding pictorial symbols. Here we investigate the ability of children with autism spectrum disorder and language-matched typically developing children to contextualize symbolic information communicated by pictures in a search task that did…

Two studies examined children's map construction skills when drawing demands were removed from the task and scenes were highly simplified. Study 1 compared the performance of first graders and third graders on their ability to preserve configuration during transformation of pictured arrays from eye-level to aerial views. For children with…

A single-subject, alternating treatment study compared the impact of two types of photograph displays of contrasting contextual complexity. The study examined the impact of high-context and no-context photographs, displayed on an iPad, on the ability of three preschool children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to transition to play activities.…

To examine the visual attention, emotional responses, learning, perceptions and attitudes of learners interacting with an animated pedagogical agent, this study compared a multimedia learning environment with an emotionally-expressive animated pedagogical agent, with a non-expressive animated pedagogical agent, and without an agent. Visual…

Prior research indicates that synchronized tapping performance is very poor with flashing visual stimuli compared with auditory stimuli. Three finger-tapping experiments compared flashing visual metronomes with visual metronomes containing a spatial component, either compatible, incompatible, or orthogonal to the tapping action. In Experiment 1,…

This study investigated the relative extent to which developing readers (6- and 9-year-olds) of English (deep) or Greek (transparent) orthography exhibit serial and exterior letter effects in letter position encoding. Participants were given a visual search task that required detection of a pre-specified target letter within a random five-letter…

The purpose of this study is to investigate student interactions with simulations, and teacher support of those interactions, within naturalistic high school physics classroom settings. This study focuses on data from two lesson sequences that were conducted in several physics classrooms. The lesson sequences were conducted in a whole class…

To examine visual and verbal coding strategies, I asked children with intellectual disabilities and peers matched for MA and CA to perform picture memory span tasks with phonologically similar, visually similar, long, or nonsimilar named items. The CA group showed effects consistent with advanced verbal memory coding (phonological similarity and…

This article reports the results of an experiment investigating the role of comic strips on ESL learners' reading comprehension. The students' proficiency levels were estimated, and students were organized into a low intermediate-level proficiency group (low-level students) and a high intermediate-level proficiency group (high-level students).…

In two experiments, 102 mechanically naive college students viewed an animation on bicycle tire pump operation with a verbal description before or during the animation or without description. Improved performance of those receiving description during the animation supports a dual-coding hypothesis of connections between visual and verbal stimuli.…