Individual looks at television vary enormously in length, and this has previously indicated differences in ongoing cognitive processes. Furthermore, the relative frequency of looks of different lengths may indicate styles of attention to television. This article compares visual attention of 152 subjects across a variety of genres and examines…

Recent structural and functional imaging work, as well as neuropathology and neuropsychology studies, provide strong empirical support for the involvement of frontal cortex in autism. The Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) is a computer-administered set of neuropsychological tests developed to examine specific components…

Empathy is an essential part of normal social functioning, yet there are precious few instruments for measuring individual differences in this domain. In this article we review psychological theories of empathy and its measurement. Previous instruments that purport to measure this have not always focused purely on empathy. We report a new…

The effects of appetitive controllability on behavioral and cortisol reactivity to novelty in 12 infant rhesus monkeys were studied. Surrogate-peer-reared infants had homecage access to food treats contingently via lever pressing ("master") or noncontingently ("yoked") for 12 weeks from postnatal month 2. Masters lever-pressed more, but did not…

Patterns of individual scores are used to critique citywide testing of urban children at the beginning of their schooling. Of the 47 children identified as gifted in a citywide assessment, 25 exhibited substantial intra individual differences between skill subscales on a standardized intelligence test. Eighty percent of the children had a…

This is a study of the lexical and grammatical abilities of 16 lexically precocious talkers. These children, aged 2;0 were compared to their age-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;0, and their expressive vocabulary-matched peers, 22 typical talkers aged 2;6. Individual differences in children's lexical knowledge at 2;0 were stable -- evident…

This study investigated the social regulatory function of infant nondistress vocalization in modulating maternal response. Thirteen infants and their mothers were observed weekly in a face-to-face interaction situation from 4 to 24 weeks. After the occurrences and the speech quality of infant nondistress vocalization were identified, maternal…

Fifteen young adults with intellectual disability and 17 college students learned the locations of 5 landmarks on an island map and then scanned from one landmark to another. In the perception condition, the landmarks were visible; in the imagery condition, they were not. The rate of scanning over distance was similar for perception and imagery…

Persons with mental retardation often exhibit greater interference in visual selective attention tasks than do persons matched with them on CA. My goal here was to evaluate whether differences in distractor interference between persons with and without mental retardation may be related to differences in negative priming. Fifteen participants with…

Reading and speechreading are both visual skills based on speech and language processing. Here we explore individual differences in speechreading in profoundly prelingually deaf adults, hearing adults with a history of dyslexia, and hearing adults with no history of a literacy disorder. Speechreading skill distinguished the three groups: the deaf…

Virtually all research affirms the importance of a general factor (i.e., Spearman's "g") in accounting for individual differences in intelligence (Spearman, 1904). However, some scholars have suggested that cognitive abilities are not organised uniformly across all levels of age and ability. Using standardisation data from the Woodcock Johnson…

Shannon E. Coulter and Susan L. Groenke recognize that student differences in interests, learning styles, and readiness for certain knowledge necessitate individualized processes for effectively learning vocabulary. They offer strategies and word games that help students make meaningful connections and improve comprehension. They also give advice…

The present study investigated intraindividual variation in students' interest experience in 3 school subjects and the predictive power of perceived autonomy support and control. Participants were 261 students in 7th grade. After a survey of students' individual interests and other individual characteristics, repeated lesson-specific measures of…

We describe a model for new and senior faculty members, integrating a behavioral approach to enhancing teaching skills with research from the field of positive psychology on virtues and character strengths. The Teacher Behaviors Checklist (Keeley, Smith, & Buskist, 2006) identifies target behaviors amenable to modification, derived from…

The present study investigated the relative contributions of experiential and ability factors to second language (L2) passage comprehension and L2 vocabulary retention. Participants included a cross section of 99 adult learners of Spanish as a foreign language enrolled in beginning through advanced level university Spanish courses. Participants…