Traditionally, the exogenous control of gaze by external saliencies and the endogenous control of gaze by knowledge and context have been viewed as competing systems, with late infancy seen as a period of strengthening top-down control over the vagaries of the input. Here we found that one-year-old infants control sustained attention through head…

Visual objects are often defined by multiple features. Therefore, learning novel objects entails learning feature conjunctions. Visual cortex is organized into distinct anatomical compartments, each of which is devoted to processing a single feature. A prime example are neurons purely selective to color and orientation, respectively. However,…

It has been reported that visual statistical learning (VSL) is facilitated in skewed distributions. However, it remains unclear whether enhancement of VSL in Zipfian distributions is due to consciousness of the regularities presented at high frequency. This study addressed this issue. We measured participants' subjective confidence in regularities…

More than 50 years ago, Bongard introduced 100 visual concept learning problems as a challenge for artificial vision systems. These problems are now known as Bongard problems. Although they are well known in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, only very little progress has been made toward building systems that can solve a substantial…

This experiment employed viewing time methods to investigate the effects of individual differences in visuospatial working memory (VWM) on the processing of older adults' bridging inferences in the understanding of visual narratives. The results showed that older adults could make bridging inferences in visual narrative processing, and that VWM…

The term learning styles (LS) describes the notion that individuals have a preferred modality of learning (i.e., vision, audition, or kinesthesis) and that matching instruction to this modality results in optimal learning. During the last decades, LS has received extensive criticism, yet they remain a virtual truism within education. One of the…

Images are central to our understanding of and learning about our world. We argue that visual training needs to be improved in the higher education system to enhance the potential of visual thinking to mediate productively our relationship with the context we inhabit. Initiatives from the social sciences and humanities since the end of the twenty…

The visual system can learn statistical regularities and form search habits that guide attention to a region where a target frequently appears. Although regularities in the real world can change over time, little is known about how such changes affect habit learning. Using a location probability learning task, we demonstrated that a constant…

In military operations, rapid and accurate decision-making is crucial, especially in visually complex and high-pressure environments. This study investigates how eye and head movement metrics can infer changes in search behavior during a naturalistic shooting scenario in virtual reality (VR). Thirty-one participants performed a foraging search…

The main objective of this study was to explore the benefits of the use of educational audio-visual materials in facilitating learning for students with hearing loss. The study analysed whether students with hearing loss had a visual learning preference when they watched an audio-visual and if the images present contributed to the retention of…

From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical…

In real-world settings, vision language models (VLMs) should robustly handle naturalistic, noisy visual content as well as domain-specific language and concepts. For example, K-12 educators using digital learning platforms may need to examine and provide feedback across many images of students' math work. To assess the potential of VLMs to support…

Categories are fundamental to everyday life and the ability to learn new categories is relevant across the lifespan. Categories are ubiquitous across modalities, supporting complex processes such as object recognition and speech perception. Prior work has proposed that different categories may engage learning systems with unique developmental…

Reflective practice is considered a highly valued graduate attribute in the field of occupational therapy. Occupational therapy educators influence and shape how students develop into reflective practitioners. Reflective practice requires a set of complex thinking skills that are typically focused on personal experiences and can be broken down…

Visual categorization is ubiquitous in many professions, yet training programs are typically time- and effort-intensive. This work focuses on developing methods to improve human learning and performance on challenging visual categorization tasks, e.g., bird species identification, diagnostic dermatology. As part of the general approach, we infer…