At the highest level, this dissertation is a case study on how bias can become encoded into the tools used to measure a construct and into the very definition of the construct itself. In this case, the construct is spatial ability. This dissertation focuses on the validity and accuracy of spatial tests and illuminates gender bias that is…

The aim of the study was to focus on whether visual processing differs between distinct levels of reading competence in young adults, from a regular orthography. We compared the 10% highest scoring (HRC) and the 10% lowest scoring groups (LRC) of reading competence (using the word chain test, WCT) in visual processing of global coherent motion and…

Background: Assessment of intelligence and executive function (EF) is common in complex neuropsychiatric practice. Although previous studies have shown that EF and intelligence are related, it is unknown whether these constructs relate to one another in a similar manner across different ability groups (mild intellectual disability, borderline…

Introduction: One of the lines of research that has aroused great interest in recent years has been to determine the role played by certain cognitive abilities in academic performance. This article describes the relationship between executive functions (interference, flexibility and planning) and empathy and their influence on the academic…

Prosaccade and antisaccade errors in the context of social and nonsocial stimuli were investigated in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 19) a matched control sample (n = 19), and a small sample of youth with obsessive compulsive disorder (n = 9). Groups did not differ in error rates in the prosaccade condition for any stimulus…

This article discusses the increasing emphasis on using pictorial sources in teaching, learning and assessment in history and asserts that pedagogies for interpreting visual imagery need to be purposefully aligned in relation to the particular media or production contexts under study. Expecting students to be able to glean meaning from images…

Although perceptual information is utilized to judge size or depth, little work has investigated whether such information is used to make memory predictions. The present study examined how the font size of to-be-remembered words influences predicted memory performance. Participants studied words for a free-recall test that varied in font size and…

Intuitively, dynamic visual stimuli, such as moving objects or flashing lights, attract attention. Visual search tasks have revealed that dynamic targets among static distractors can indeed efficiently guide attention. The present study shows that the reverse case, a static target among dynamic distractors, allows for relatively efficient…

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether…

Eye movements latencies toward peripherally presented stimuli were measured in 10-year-old dyslexic and control children. Dyslexic subjects, previously found to be oversensitive to stimulation of the magnocellular channel, showed reduced latencies as compared to normally reading controls. An attention shifting task was also used which showed no…

The attentional blink refers to the finding that the 2nd of 2 targets embedded in a stream of rapidly presented distractors is often missed. Whereas most theories of the attentional blink focus on limited-capacity processes that occur after target selection, the present work investigates the selection process itself. Identifying a target letter…

Overselective stimulus control was assessed in 29 students at residential schools for individuals with developmental disabilities. Overselectivity testing included three different delayed identity matching-to-sample tasks. Sample stimuli for the Form/Color Test were nine possible combinations of three colors and three forms. On each trial, the S+…