Background: Adequate assessment of "normal variation" versus "abnormal status" is particularly difficult for clinicians working with young children who are under 5 years of age and who present with slow language development. There is therefore clinical motivation to identify possible key difficulties (or "risk…

The question of whether and how subjective cognitive complaints are related to actual cognitive performance represents a central issue in applied cognitive aging research. Until recently, however, many studies have failed to find a strong association between subjective cognitive complaints and actual cognitive performance. In our study, we examine…

The applicability of the identical elements (IE) model of arithmetic fact retrieval (T. C. Rickard, A. F. Healy, & L. E. Bourne, 1994) to cued recall from episodic (image and sentence) memory was explored in 3 transfer experiments. In agreement with results from arithmetic, speedup following even minimal practice recalling a missing word from an…

Some potential contributions of invariants, heuristics, and exemplars to the perception of dynamic properties in the colliding balls task were explored. On each trial, an observer is asked to determine the heavier of 2 colliding balls. The invariant approach assumes that people can learn to detect complex visual patterns that reliably specify…

In three structural priming experiments, we investigated temporarily ambiguous sentences such as "While the man was visiting the children who were surprisingly pleasant and funny played outside." Participants produced more transitive sentences following such temporarily ambiguous sentences than following unambiguous sentences that were…

With the emerging population of the oldest-old (those ages 85 and older), it is crucial to understand and prepare for their psychosocial needs. Worry is linked to psychological well-being and physical health, but little is known about the oldest-old's everyday worries. The authors explored four research questions: (1) What are the worries of the…

Four experiments investigated the nature of spatial representations used in locomotion. Participants learned the layout of several objects and then pointed to the objects while blindfolded in 3 conditions: before turning (baseline), after turning to a new heading (updating), and after disorientation (disorientation). The internal consistency of…

Previously it has been reported that female performance on the recall of objects and their locations in a spatial array is superior to that of males. This may reflect underlying information-processing biases whereby males organize information in a self-referential manner while females adopt a more comprehensive approach. The known female advantage…

The immediate written recall task, a widely used measure of both first language (L1) and second language (L2) reading comprehension, has been advocated over traditional test methods such as multiple choice, cloze tests and open-ended questions because it is a direct and integrative assessment task. It has been, however, criticized as requiring…

Del Giacco Art Therapy is a cognitive art therapy process that focuses on stimulating the mental sensory systems and working to stabilize the nervous system and create new neural connections in the brain. This system was created by Maureen Del Giacco, Phd. after recovering from her own traumatic brain injury and is based on extensive research of…

Research addressing the effectiveness of feedback for learning has focused on many dimensions of feedback, including the timing (Kulik & Kulik, 1988), type (Mory, 2004), and amount of available information (Dempsey et. al, 1993). Much of the feedback research in education has tacitly assumed that the available information is perceived, and any…

Pre-laboratory activities have been known to improve students' preparation before their practical work as they assist students to make available more working memory capacity for actual learning during the laboratory. The aim of this investigation was to compare two different teaching approaches which supported a pre-laboratory session by using the…

Virtual reality (VR) that immerses users in a 3D environment through use of headwear, body suits, and data gloves has demonstrated effectiveness in technical and professional education. Immersive VR is highly engaging and appealing to technically skilled young Net Generation learners. However, technical difficulty and very high costs have kept…

In order to extend the multicultural horizons of neuropsychological assessment in the Chinese mainland, a battery of eight commonly used neurocognitive tests assessing motor speed, verbal and visual-spatial memory, language fluency, attention, and executive functioning were given to 224 Mandarin-speaking school children (107 boys and 117 girls)…

This study explored the language skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs) compared to normal hearing (NH) peers. Standardized speech and language measures, including speech articulation, receptive and expressive vocabulary, syntax and morphology, and metalinguistics, were administered to 39 congenitally deaf children, ages 5 to 14, and a…