Purpose: Understanding children's speech perception strategies in noise is very important for improving their living environment. Previous studies with adults reported that closing the eyes improves speech understanding in noise by increasing the activation of cortical systems involved in listening and attention, while increased cognitive load…

Background: Gestures are an integral component in human-to-human communication when the speaker is visually present to the listener. In the past several years, research has examined how computer-generated pedagogical agents can be designed to perform the four main gesture types and what this means for agent persona and learning outcomes. The…

Cross-dimensional interference between spatial and temporal processing provides valuable insights into the neuronal representation of space and time. Previous research has frequently found asymmetric interference patterns, with temporal judgments being more affected by spatial information than vice versa. However, this asymmetry has been…

Background: There are only few guidelines on how instructional videos should be designed to optimize learning. Recently, the effects of social cues on attention allocation and learning in instructional videos have been investigated. Due to inconsistent results, it has been suggested that the visual complexity of a video influences the effect of…

It has been widely recognized that a visual impairment can limit an individual's ability to learn through visual observations. This decreased limited visual access which could impact how the skills to access and recognize the world around them develop. However, when the visual impairment was brain-based, such as in Cortical/Cerebral Visual…

The current study aimed to explore the influence of pedagogical agents and visual cues on students' deep learning within a virtual reality setting by evaluating the effects on various factors, including learning outcomes, intrinsic motivation, cognitive load, learning engagement, and cognitive processing metrics. The investigation utilized a 2 x 2…

This paper analyses the opportunities for presenting knowledge that are created when assessment allows senior high school biology students to draw on linguistic and visual resources when constructing meaning in response to short-answer examination-style questions requiring a sequential explanation. Students within one senior high school biology…

Previous studies demonstrated that dual-task impairments are higher in children than in young adults. A previous study systematically assessed the sources of these larger dual-task impairments by identifying age-related differences in capacity limitations during dual-task processing. Capacity limitations in central cognitive processes were present…

Video materials require learners to manage concurrent verbal and pictorial processing. To facilitate second language (L2) learners' video comprehension, the amount of presented information should thus be compatible with human beings' finite cognitive capacity. In light of this, the current study explored whether a reduction in multimodal…

Our visual system samples external information, adjusts its sensitivity and constructs a stable representation of the world that allows us to perceive and interact with objects in our environments. Visual information with different levels of complexity is processed through the hierarchically organized visual cortical areas. This dissertation…

The spatial split-attention principle suggests that presenting related words and pictures spatially close to one another will improve learning compared with a spatially distant design, and two meta-analyses have shown support for the principle. However, it is not clear why the principle occurs. It has been theorized that integrated graphic designs…

Visual working memory (VWM) is limited in both the "capacity" of information it can retain and the "rate" at which it encodes that information. We examined the influence of stimulus complexity on these 2 limitations of VWM. Observers performed a change-detection task with English letters of various fonts or letters from…

The present study was to explore whether dynamic visualizations enriched with visuospatial cues can optimize learners' cognitive processing of mechanical systems. The animated conditions and cueing patterns were the independent variables with an attempt to investigate their impacts on retention and transfer tests. Either dynamic or static…

A consistent finding in the Stroop literature is that congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between words presented in incongruent vs. congruent colors) are larger for mostly-congruent items (e.g., the word RED presented most often in red) than for mostly-incongruent items (e.g., the word GREEN presented most often in…

Purpose: This study investigated the effect of cognitive load (CL) on the categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical tones to discuss the application of the generalized pulse-skipping hypothesis. This hypothesis assumes that listeners might miss/skip temporal pulses and lose essential speech information due to CL, which consequently affects…