In contrast to other primates, human children's imitation performance goes from low to high fidelity soon after infancy. Are such changes associated with the development of other forms of learning? We addressed this question by testing 215 children (26-59 months) on two social conditions (imitation, emulation)--involving a demonstration--and two…

The use and understanding of ordinal terms (e.g., "first" and "second") is a developmental milestone that has been relatively unexplored in the preschool age range. In the present study, 4- and 5-year-olds watched as a reward was placed in one of three train cars labeled by the experimenter with an ordinal (e.g.,…

In transparent orthographies like German, isolated learning disabilities in either reading or spelling are common and occur as often as a combined reading and spelling disability. However, most issues surrounding the cognitive causes of these isolated or combined literacy difficulties are yet unresolved. Recently, working memory dysfunctions have…

R. Sekuler, P. Tynan, and E. Levinson (1973) found that when 2 characters are presented side-by-side with a short onset asynchrony, subjectively they often appear in a "first-left, then-right" order. The authors of this article conducted 6 experiments in which observers judged the temporal order (TOJs) in which 2 digits were presented. They found…

Background: The Hebb effect is a form of repetition-driven long-term learning that is thought to provide an analogue for the processes involved in new word learning. Other evidence suggests that verbal short-term memory also constrains now vocabulary acquisition, but if the Hebb effect is independent of short-term memory, then it may be possible…

Recent research that assessed spatial judgments about multisensory stimuli suggests that humans integrate multisensory inputs in a statistically optimal manner by weighting each input by its normalized reciprocal variance. Is integration similarly optimal when humans judge the temporal properties of bimodal stimuli? Twenty-four participants…

Previous studies that have found attentional capture effects for stimuli of motivational significance do not directly measure initial attentional deployment, leaving it unclear to what extent these items produce attentional capture. Visual prior entry, as measured by temporal order judgments (TOJs), rests on the premise that allocated attention…

The authors revisited evidence in favor of modularity and of functional equivalence between the processing of verbal and spatial information in short-term memory. This was done by investigating the patterns of intrusions, omissions, transpositions, and fill-ins in verbal and spatial serial recall and order reconstruction tasks under control,…

Working memory is the cognitive ability to hold a discrete amount of information in mind in an accessible state for utilization in mental tasks. This cognitive ability is impaired in many clinical populations. There have been a number of theoretical shifts in the way that working memory is conceptualized and assessed in the experimental…

Structure was imposed on a tapping task by requiring participants to reproduce sequences of responses to icons organised in spatial clusters. A first experiment featured sequences either segregated or not segregated by clusters. Accuracy was higher for sequences segregated by clusters. Moreover, inter-response times were longer at cluster…

Serial order is fundamental to perception, cognition and behavioral action. Three experiments investigated infants' perception, learning and discrimination of serial order. Four- and 8-month-old infants were habituated to three sequentially moving objects making visible and audible impacts and then were tested on separate test trials for their…

Lists six basic principles for building numeracy. Presents variety of activities in four categories of number concepts: spatial relationship, classifying, patterns, and correspondence. Suggests music, movement, and book ideas for each category of activity. Gives directions for making a geoboard and a reusable graph board. (DLH)

The ability to recognize, extend, and relate patterns and sequences to numeric, figural, and word representations plays a prominent role in science education. This study provided validation information for an instrument to assess childrens' ability to recognize and extend patterns and sequence in different representational forms. A 57-item…

This paper explores the preliminary results of an ongoing 3-year study of cognitive function and cognitive education among hearing-impaired persons (n=200) and considers these results in the context of previous studies. Cognitive task performance among the deaf was below average for the verbal and sequential skills associated with the left…

The visual scanning of redundant and random spatial configurations of two-digit numbers was investigated in a target recognition task. The experimental technique involved a brief exposure of a probe (a two-digit number) at the center of the visual field, followed by a spatial pattern of 16 two-digit numbers which included the matching target in…