Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is one of the most frequently performed surgical procedures worldwide with occasional serious complications, including bile duct injuries, that may reflect surgeon misperception, rather than errors of skill and knowledge. Intraoperative cholangiography (IOC) is an imaging procedure that may prevent or…

This dissertation examines how listeners' knowledge of interspeaker variability guides their generalization of perceptual learning in multi-talker listening. A series of perceptual learning experiments are conducted to evaluate whether listeners generalize what they have learned about a previous talker's production of sibilants and stop VOT to…

Embodied cognition posits that physical interactions with the environment play a crucial role in learning, including complex, abstract concepts in STEM disciplines. This is relevant for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) learners who often utilize sign language, which is a naturally embodied, visuospatial mode of communication. My dissertation…

The human brain is a flexible information processing system. Across a range of simple and complex tasks, such as walking across the street to playing basketball, the brain transforms sensory information from the environment into corresponding motor actions. This sensory input to motor output transformation likely requires a sequence of complex…

This dissertation describes a program of research encompassing three studies that focused on examining the effects of enhanced expectancies and perceptions of success on motor learning. OPTIMAL theory (Wulf & Lewthwaite, 2016) proposes that practice manipulations that enhance a learner's expectations for future successful outcomes lead to…

Achieving an in-depth understanding of unfamiliar science concepts has been found to be difficult when learners can not index science language to relevant sensorimotor experiences. Ongoing research in embodied cognition highlights the importance of relevant sensorimotor experiences in understanding and learning new information. Aiming to foster…

Young children with HCP experience difficulties performing age-appropriate daily activities such as self-care and play. Research in neuroplasticity has shown that intensive, task-specific training in early development is ideal to maximize functioning in children with HCP. The aim of this study was to analyze the feasibility of a new manualized…

As a result of increased academic rigor and limited movement opportunities during the school day, students may have more limited focus and difficulty in maintaining attention in the classroom (McMurrer, 2007; Stark, Rentner, & Kober 2014; Common Core State Standards 2014). As students have more difficulty maintaining attention, their learning…

Speech utterances are phoneme sequences but may not always be represented as such in the brain. For instance, electropalatography evidence indicates that as speaking rate increases, gestures within syllables are manipulated separately but those within consonant clusters act as one motor unit. Moreover, speech error data suggest that a syllable's…

Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of music and music + instruction on task-oriented behaviors in preschool children with ASD within individual gross motor movement settings. Five preschool children (four boys; one girl) diagnosed with ASD attending a Midwestern private preschool for children with ASD served as participants. The…

This study investigates the role of mental simulation in message formulation and grammatical encoding in two typologically distinct languages, English and Japanese. It examines relationships among physical motion, mental simulation, and sentence production, following the claims of Perceptual Symbol Systems (Barsalou, 1999) that people understand…