Eye-tracking procedures generate copious process data that could be valuable in establishing the response processes component of modern validity theory. However, there is a lack of tools for assessing and visualizing response processes using process data such as eye-tracking fixation sequences, especially those suitable for young children. This…

Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

Poor academic performance from extensive social media usage appears to be due to students' inability to multitask between distractions and academic work. However, the degree to which visually distracted students can acquire lecture information presented aurally is unknown. This study examined the ability of students visually distracted by social…

Purpose: This study compared attention control and flexibility in school-age children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) based on their performance on a behavioral task and parent report. We used a classic attention-shifting paradigm that included manipulations of task goals and timing to test effects of varying demands for…

Two experiments investigated how people use buildings and street configurations to reorient in large-scale environments. In immersive virtual environments, participants learned objects' locations in an intersection consisting of 4 streets. The objects' locations were specified by 2 cues: a building and/or the street configuration. During the test,…

The ability to track moving objects is a crucial skill for performance in everyday spatial tasks. The tracking mechanism depends on representation of moving items as coherent entities, which follow the spatiotemporal constraints of objects in the world. In the present experiment, participants tracked 1 to 4 targets in a display of 8 identical…

Previous studies have shown that people start traveling sales problem tours significantly more often from boundary than from interior nodes. There are a number of possible reasons for such a tendency: first, it may arise as a direct result of the processes involved in tour construction; second, boundary points may be perceptually more salient than…

Potential relations between gaze cueing, social use of gaze, and ability to follow line of sight were examined in children with autism and typically developing peers. Children with autism (mean age = 10 years) demonstrated intact gaze cueing. However, they preferred to follow arrows instead of eyes to infer mental state, and showed decreased…

Verbal overshadowing reflects the impairment in memory performance following verbalization of nonverbal stimuli. However, it is not clear whether the same mechanisms are responsible for verbal overshadowing effects observed with different stimuli and task demands. In the present article, we propose a multiprocess view that reconciles the main…

The placebo effect is any outcome that is not attributed to a specific treatment but rather to an individual's mindset (Benson & Friedman, 1996). This phenomenon can extend beyond its typical use in pharmaceutical drugs to involve aspects of everyday life, such as the effect of sleep on cognitive functioning. In 2 studies examining whether…

Vision often dominates audition when attentive processes are involved (e.g., the ventriloquist effect), yet little is known about the relative potential of the two modalities to initiate a "break through of the unattended". The present study was designed to systematically compare the capacity of task-irrelevant auditory and visual events to…

This study compared the effects of static photographs and video prompts on the independent performance of cooking related tasks by six young adults with moderate intellectual disabilities. An adapted alternating treatment design with baseline and final treatment phase was used to measure the percentage of tasks correctly completed by each student…

Compared the performance of children with and without autism in object-based positive and negative priming tasks within a visual search procedure. Found object-based positive and negative priming effects in both groups, with no group differences in the magnitude of the effects. Compared to typically developing children, children with autism were…

The aims of this study were (1) to assess the relative effectiveness of verbal and visual elaboration prompts and question-answering prompts on children's incidental memory, and (2) to determine whether performance improvement associated with pictorial elaboration could be augmented by either verbal elaboration or question-answering procedures.…

Two studies investigated whether 10- to 11-month-olds possess skills for parsing ongoing behavior along boundaries correlated with initiation and completion of intentions. Found that infants showed renewed interest in test videos in which motion paused in the midst of an actor's pursuit of intentions; suspended motion at intentional boundary…