Multielement visual tracking and visual search are 2 tasks that are held to require visual-spatial attention. The authors used the attentional operating characteristic (AOC) method to determine whether both tasks draw continuously on the same attentional resource (i.e., whether the 2 tasks are mutually exclusive). The authors found that observers…

Like all probabilistic decisions, recognition memory judgments are based on inferences about the strength and quality of stimulus familiarity. In recent articles, B. W. A. Whittlesea and J. Leboe (2000; J. Leboe & B. W. A. Whittlesea, 2002) proposed that such memory decisions entail various heuristics, similar to well-known heuristics in overt…

Words and pictures with earlier learned labels are processed faster than words and pictures with later learned labels. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been extensively investigated in many different types of tasks. This article provides a review of these studies including picture naming, word naming, speeded word naming, word…

This paper reports on a study that was carried out to determine learners' attitudes to learning grammar through the use of two types of consciousness-raising tasks. A deductive task provided explicit explanations of a grammar structure, while an inductive task required learners to discover the grammar rules for themselves. The study investigated…

This paper describes an action research project undertaken to look into the effectiveness of tasks designed to raise learner awareness of conversational strategies. The goal was to test whether tasks and direct instruction aimed at promoting learner awareness of conversational language at the discourse-level had any impact on the students'…

This exploratory study was conducted in an introductory biology course to determine 1) how students used the large lecture environment to create their own learning tasks during studying and 2) whether meaningful learning resulted from the students' efforts. Academic task research from the K-12 education literature and student approaches to…

Children's sensitivity to context when making inferences about ability was investigated. In three studies, elementary school children (ages 5 to 10, total N = 332) were asked to reason about the relation between academic ability and the speed with which characters completed puzzle tasks. Participants were primed to interpret the characters' task…

"Theory of mind" development is now an important research field in deaf studies. Past research with the classic false belief task has consistently reported a delay in theory of mind development in deaf children born of hearing parents, while performance of second-generation deaf children is more problematic with some contradictory results. The…

This paper presents a user-centred design and evaluation methodology for ensuring the usability of IR interfaces. The methodology is based on sequentially performing: a competitive analysis, user task analysis, heuristic evaluation, formative evaluation and a summative comparative evaluation. These techniques are described, and their application…

The cAMP/PKA pathway plays a critical role in learning and memory systems in animals ranging from mice to "Drosophila" to "Aplysia." Studies of olfactory learning in "Drosophila" suggest that altered expression of either positive or negative regulators of the cAMP/PKA signaling pathway beyond a certain optimum range may be deleterious. Here we…

This study investigates the presence and latency of the P600 component in response to subject-verb agreement violations in spoken language in people with and without developmental dyslexia. The two groups performed at-ceiling level on judging the sentences on their grammaticality, but the ERP data revealed subtle differences between them. The P600…

This study investigated attention control in tasks involving the processing of relational terms (more highly grammaticized linguistic stimuli: spatial prepositions) and non-relational terms (less highly grammaticized lexical stimuli: nouns) in a first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants were adult bilinguals with greater proficiency in…

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed…

This study demonstrated how the tenets of positive behavior support could be used to teach an educational activity. Emphasis was placed on the implementation of practical strategies to minimize errors during instruction and maximize positive outcomes. A 9-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome served as the participant, and the skill targeted for…

Surface similarity generally promotes reasoning by analogy and physical similarity has been shown to have a powerful positive effect on very young children's use of a scale model as a source of information about another space. The research reported here investigated 2 1/2-year-old children's performance in an object retrieval task when asked to…