The conditions for serial search are described. A multiple target search methodology (Thornton & Gilden, 2007) is used to home in on the simplest target/distractor contrast that effectively mandates a serial scheduling of attentional resources. It is found that serial search is required when (a) targets and distractors are mirror twins, and…

This study investigated the relationship between speech perception, phonological processing and reading skills among school-aged children classified as "skilled" and "less skilled" readers based on their ability to read words, decode non-words, and comprehend short passages. Three speech perception tasks involving categorization of speech continua…

We investigated the influences of two different suprapostural visual tasks, visual searching and visual inspection, on the postural sway of children with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Sixteen ASD children (age=8.75 [plus or minus] 1.34 years; height=130.34 [plus or minus] 11.03 cm) were recruited from a local support group.…

Assuming that self-awareness is not a unitary phenomenon, and that one can be aware of different aspects of self at any one time, it follows that selective impairments in self-awareness can occur. This article explores the idea that autism involves a particular deficit in awareness of the "psychological self", or "theory of "own" mind". This…

Neurologically normal observers misperceive the midpoint of horizontal lines as systematically "leftward" of veridical center, a phenomenon known as pseudoneglect. Pseudoneglect is attributed to a tonic asymmetry of visuospatial attention favoring left hemispace. Whereas visuospatial attention is biased toward left hemispace, some evidence…

When young adults carry out visual search, distractors that are semantically related, rather than unrelated, to targets can disrupt target selection (see [Belke et al., 2008] and [Moores et al., 2003]). This effect is apparent on the first eye movements in search, suggesting that attention is sometimes captured by related distractors. Here we…

Human infants develop a variety of attentional mechanisms that allow them to extract relevant information from a cluttered multimodal world. We know that both social and nonsocial cues shift infants' attention, but not how these cues differentially affect learning of multimodal events. Experiment 1 used social cues to direct 8- and 4-month-olds'…

Previous studies of visually symptomatic dyslexics have found that their contrast thresholds for pattern discrimination are the same as non-dyslexics. However, when noise is added to the stimuli, contrast thresholds rise markedly in dyslexics compared with non-dyslexics. This result could be due to impaired noise exclusion in dyslexics. Some…

"It can be said, and has been said by many, that the internationalization of education is inevitable, as the advancement of knowledge and understanding is a global enterprise that has no borders." Various motivations drive international ventures, such as expanding access to higher education, generating profits, increasing visibility and…

Studying short-term memory within the framework of the working memory model and its associated paradigms (Baddeley, 2000; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) offers the chance to compare similarities and differences between the way that verbal and tonal materials are processed. This study examined amateur musicians' short-term memory using a newly adapted…

Purpose: Previous research has found that auditory training helps native English speakers to perceive phonemic vowel length contrasts in Japanese, but their performance did not reach native levels after training. Given that multimodal information, such as lip movement and hand gesture, influences many aspects of native language processing, the…

The author examines the empirical, methodological, theoretical, and practical contributions of the six studies in this special issue on eye tracking as a tool to study and enhance multimedia learning. The design of learning environments involving graphics should be consistent with a research-based theory of how people learn and evidence-based…

Several groups have recently reported that people with autism may suffer from a deficit in visual motion processing and proposed that these deficits may be related to a general dorsal stream dysfunction. In order to test the dorsal stream deficit hypothesis, we investigated coherent and biological motion perception as well as coherent form…

Communication, language and conceptual knowledge related to concrete objects may rely on the sensory-motor systems from which they emerge. How abstract concepts can emerge from these systems is however still unknown. Here we report a functional interaction between a specific meaningful finger movement, such as a finger grip closing, and a concept…

Speech prosody has traditionally been considered solely in terms of its auditory features, yet correlated visual features exist, such as head and eyebrow movements. This study investigated the extent to which visual prosodic features are able to affect the perception of the auditory features. Participants were presented with videos of a speaker…