A study examined memory for pictures and words in 16 adults with mental retardation and 24 controls. Pictorial superiority effects occurred in free recall and recognition for both intelligence-level groups. Correlational analyses indicated working memory span was primarily related to recall performance, irrespective of stimulus format. (Contains…

Explores the hypothesis that children identified as having phonological processing problems may have difficulty processing a different accent. Children with speech difficulties were compared with matched controls on four measures of auditory processing. Children were presented with stimuli in their own accent and in an unfamiliar accent…

A study investigated the effectiveness of an instructional strategy in teaching 10 elementary-aged students with moderate intellectual disabilities how to shop for groceries. Following the intervention, which consisted of in vivo training using constant time delay and simulation training using a pictorial storyboard, six students achieved…

Discusses three experiments that used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique to investigate the role of syllabic units in beginning and adult readers. Participants responded whenever a visually presented target syllable appeared at the beginning of a subsequently presented printed word. (Author/VWL)

A study investigated whether 32 adolescents with reading disabilities (RD) were slower at processing visual information compared to children of comparable age and reading level, or whether their deficit was specific to the written word. Adolescents with RD demonstrated difficulties in processing rapidly presented verbal and nonverbal visual…

Investigates the role of visual communication in a spoken research genre: the scientific research paper. Analyzes 2,048 visuals projected during 90 papers given at five international conferences in three fields (Geology, medicine, physics), in order to bring out the recurrent features of the visual dimension. (Author/VWL)

In studies of function transformation, participants initially are taught to match stimuli in the presence of a contextual cue, X; the stimuli to be matched bear some formal relation to each other, for example, a relation of opposition or difference. In a second phase, the participants are taught to match arbitrary stimuli (say, A and B) in the…

Children who have status epilepticus have continuous or rapidly repeating seizures that may be life-threatening and may cause life-long changes in brain and behavior. The extent to which status epilepticus causes deficits in auditory discrimination is unknown. A naturalistic auditory location discrimination method was used to evaluate this…

This study tested the presence of the face inversion effect in 4-month-old infants using habituation to criterion followed by a novelty preference paradigm. Results of Experiment 1 confirmed previous findings, showing that when 1 single photograph of a face is presented in the habituation phase and when infants are required to recognize the same…

Two priming experiments demonstrated exogenous attentional persistence to the fundamental auditory dimensions of frequency (Experiment 1) and time (Experiment 2). In a divided-attention task, participants responded to an independent dimension, the identification of three-tone sequence patterns, for both prime and probe stimuli. The stimuli were…

Neurologically normal individuals exhibit strong leftward response biases during free-viewing perceptual judgments of brightness, quantity, and size. When participants view two mirror-reversed objects and they are forced to choose which object appears darker, more numerous, or larger, the stimulus with the relevant feature on the left side is…

Objective: Deficits in executive functioning, including working memory (WM) deficits, have been suggested to be important in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). During 2002 to 2003, the authors conducted a multicenter, randomized, controlled, double-blind trial to investigate the effect of improving WM by computerized, systematic…

Feedback is one of the most important aspects of improving performance because it corrects, reinforces, and motivates. It can also create bonds and enable students to see that their performance is important. This article defines feedback, presents three important functions of feedback, identifies the four forms of feedback, gives examples of…

This article offers a theoretical framework of a meaningful art education for blind people. Existing literature focuses on the interaction between the artwork and the blind person. This text describes this aesthetic encounter which is complex due to tactile sensations, individual differences of the non-sighted viewer and specific features of the…

The goal was to study the impact of a teacher-directed and a child-directed pretend play on cognitive performance in a mixed-age environment. Twenty-six observations were performed on fifty-one kindergarten children with a mean age of 4.6 years (age span from three to six years) in two mixed-aged classrooms. Data were collected regarding…