The current study aimed at investigating own- vs. other-species preferences in 3-month-old infants. The infants' eye movements were recorded during a visual preference paradigm to assess whether they show a preference for own-species faces when contrasted with other-species faces. Human and monkey faces, equated for all low-level perceptual…

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were utilized in an investigation of 21 six-month-olds' attention to and processing of global and local properties of hierarchical patterns. Overall, infants demonstrated an advantage for processing the overall configuration (i.e., global properties) of local features of hierarchical patterns; however,…

Central coherence refers to an in-built propensity to form meaningful links over a wide range of stimuli and to generalize over as wide a range of contexts as possible. In children with autism this ability is diminished, and the impact of central coherence deficits in children with autism have previously been observed using static measures of…

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between eye movements and performance in visual search tasks of varying difficulty. Experiment 1 provided evidence that a single process is used for search among static and moving items. Moreover, we estimated the functional visual field (FVF) from the gaze coordinates and found that its size…

Substantial research has focused on the allocation of spatial attention based on goals or perceptual salience. In everyday life, however, people also direct attention using their previous experience. Here we investigate the pace at which people incidentally learn to prioritize specific locations. Participants searched for a T among Ls in a visual…

Designers, teachers and administrators intuitively know that different students learn differently, but they rarely intentionally create learning environments for specific learning modalities--especially within traditionally academic spaces. The REFP workshop presented in September of 2009 at the CEFPI Annual World Conference and Expo provided…

The primary aim of this study was determining Grade 1 cognitive predictors of students at risk for writing disabilities in Grades 2 through 4. Applying cognitive measures selected to align with theoretical and empirical models of writing, tasks were administered to Grade 1 students assessing fine-motor, linguistic, and executive functions: 84 at…

The primary aim of this study was determining Grade 1 cognitive predictors of students at risk for writing disabilities in Grades 2 through 4. Applying cognitive measures selected to align with theoretical and empirical models of writing, tasks were administered to Grade 1 students assessing fine-motor, linguistic, and executive functions: 84 at…

Digital video cameras, smartphones, internet and iPads are increasingly used as visual research methods with the purpose of creating an affective corpus of data. Such visual methods are often combined with interviews or observations. Not only are visual methods part of the used research methods, the visual products are used as requisites in…

Plants, to many, are simply not as interesting as animals. Students typically prefer to study animals rather than plants and recall plants more poorly, and plants are underrepresented in the classroom. The observed paucity of interest for plants has been described as "plant blindness," a term that is meant to encapsulate both the…

The goals of this study were to explore the deficits in working memory associated with literacy disorders (i.e. developmental disorders of reading and/or spelling) and the developmental trajectories of these working memory deficits. The performance of 28 children with literacy disorders was compared to a non-disabled control group with the same…

This study was inspired by the more locally oriented processing style in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). A modified multiple object tracking (MOT) task was administered to a group of children with and without ASD. Participants not only had to distinguish moving targets from distracters, but they also had to track targets when they were visually…

The day-night paradigm, where children respond to a pair of pictures with opposite labels for a series of trials, is a widely used measure of interference control. Recent research has shown that a happy-sad variant of the day-night task was significantly more difficult than the standard day-night task. The present research examined whether the…

The ability to connect numbers and magnitudes is an important prerequisite for math learning, here referred to as number-magnitude skills. It has been proposed that working memory plays an important role in constructing these connections. The aim of the current study was to examine if working memory accounts for constructing these connections by…

This article introduces a novel approach to pedagogy within an art school in the UK HE sector, based upon a synthesis of perception theory and communication theory. It is argued that art students' drawing is empowered by strategies of teaching informed by aspects of James J. Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception relevant to an…