Investigates the information representation power of different modalities in the video data in order to collect empirical evidence for video surrogate creation and thus better support effective video browsing and information retrieval. Three types of video surrogates were created and compared under two user tasks--verbal comprehension and visual…

Maintains that visually enhanced musical performances provide an exciting and creative aspect of musical production. Explains that the conductor should choose a musical selection that offers concrete visual opportunities, focus on visual images, choose video excerpts, and use dance if possible. Finds that many visual techniques used by marching…

Phonological development in first and second languages (L1 and L2 respectively) has not been extensively studied in young children who are acquiring a second language via immersion. This lack of information is unfortunate, as the number of children who are acquiring a second language in this context is growing and such children make up a part of…

The purpose of the present study was to determine whether playing a specific ball sport, such as tennis, could maintain the coincidence-timing (CT) performance of older adults at a similar level to that of younger ones. To address this question, tennis players and nonplayers of three different age ranges (ages 20-30, 60-70, and 70-80 years)…

To investigate differences in achievement in foreign language listening comprehension, 61 students in a Foreign Language in an Elementary School (FLES) program were studied during instruction using video clips from authentic Chinese TV broadcasts in two advance organizer conditions. The first type of advance organizer consisted of written words…

Linking science and citizenship is an exciting new cross-curricular way of linking science to the wider world. It works with children's natural curiosity and questioning skills to tackle topical and moral issues relating to scientific developments, otherwise overlooked in day-to-day science teaching. The way in which the author has taught science…

A single heartbeat is a complicated process. In Dutch upper secondary biology textbooks this process is illustrated by the classical Wiggers diagram, which usually shows different heart-related quantities, like voltage (ECG), blood pressure, and the heart sounds. It may help students to understand the nature of the Wiggers diagram if they perform…

The colourful, vigorous territorial display behaviour of the Siamese fighting fish, "Betta splendens", has great appeal for both pet enthusiasts and animal behaviourists. Their beauty, longevity, easy maintenance and rearing make them a popular pet and an ideal science laboratory specimen. This investigation utilises "B. splendens" to test for the…

Background: Face processing in Williams syndrome (WS) has been a topic of heated debate over the past decade. Initial claims about a normally developing ("intact") face-processing module were challenged by data suggesting that individuals with WS used a different balance of cognitive processes from controls, even when their behavioural scores fell…

Background: The aim of this study was to investigate attention orienting triggered by another's gaze direction in autism. Method: Twelve high-functioning children with autism and gender- and age-matched normal control children were studied using two tasks. In the first task, children were asked to detect laterally presented target stimuli preceded…

The "visual world paradigm" typically involves presenting participants with a visual scene and recording eye movements as they either hear an instruction to manipulate objects in the scene or as they listen to a description of what may happen to those objects. In this study, participants heard each target sentence only after the corresponding…

Infants prefer to listen to happy speech. To assess influences of speech affect on early lexical processing, 7.5- and 10.5-month-old infants were familiarized with one word spoken with happy affect and another with neutral affect and then tested on recognition of these words in fluent passages. Infants heard all passages either with happy affect…

In unidimensional absolute identification tasks, participants identify stimuli that vary along a single dimension. Performance is surprisingly poor compared with discrimination of the same stimuli. Existing models assume that identification is achieved using long-term representations of absolute magnitudes. The authors propose an alternative…

One principle of applied research is to design intervention programs targeted to teach useful skills to the participants (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968), while structuring the program to promote generalization of the skills to the natural environment (Stokes & Baer, 1977). Proficiency in community skills (e.g., community navigation and…

Studies have suggested attention-free semantic processing of natural scenes in which concurrent tasks leave category detection unimpaired (e.g., F. Li, R. VanRullen, C. Koch, & P. Perona, 2002). Could this ability reflect detection of disjunctive feature sets rather than high-level binding? Participants detected an animal target in a rapid serial…