Visual speech inputs can enhance auditory speech information, particularly in noisy or degraded conditions. The natural statistics of audiovisual speech highlight the temporal correspondence between visual and auditory prosody, with lip, jaw, cheek and head movements conveying information about the speech envelope. Low-frequency spatial and…

Early visual deprivation impairs some, but not all, aspects of face perception. We investigated the possible developmental roots of later abnormalities by using a face detection task to test infants treated for bilateral congenital cataract within 1 hour of their first focused visual input. The seven patients were between 5 and 12 weeks old…

We investigated the influence of being imitated on children's subsequent trust. Five- to six-year-olds interacted with one experimenter who mimicked their choices and another experimenter who made different choices. Children were then presented with two tests. In a preference test, the experimenters offered conflicting preferences for the contents…

Assistive technology enables young children with disabilities to more effectively access their environment, facilitating the development of social-emotional, communicative, and cognitive skills. Research indicates that when service providers make decisions about assistive technology, they are more likely to choose low-tech options over high-tech…

Evidence suggests that people with autism rely less on holistic visual information than typical adults. The current studies examine this by investigating core visual processes that contribute to holistic processing--namely, individuation and element grouping--and how they develop in participants with autism and typically developing (TD)…

Performance of the Stroop task reflects two conflicts--informational (between the incongruent word and ink color) and task (between relevant color naming and irrelevant word reading). The task conflict is usually not visible, and is only seen when task control is damaged. Using the stop-signal paradigm, a few studies demonstrated longer…

The present study sheds light on the interplay between lexical and decision processes in the lexical decision task by exploring the effects of lexical decision difficulty on semantic priming effects. In 2 experiments, we increased lexical decision difficulty by either using transposed letter wordlike nonword distracters (e.g., JUGDE; Experiment 1)…

To what degree does our representation of the immediate world depend solely on its relevance to what we are currently doing? We examined whether relevance per se can cause "blindness," even when there is no resource limitation. In a novel paradigm, people looked at a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring--the task…

Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through…

One of the words that readers of English skip most often is the definite article "the". Most accounts of reading assume that in order for a reader to skip a word, it must have received some lexical processing. The definite article is skipped so regularly, however, that the oculomotor system might have learned to skip the letter string…

Given that little research has been conducted to date in the classroom about the exploitation of aspects of "visual grammar" for the teaching of literacy, the purpose of this study is to provide research data to support the adoption of a common image/text relations metalanguage in educational practice as an effective tool for critically…

A central project of feminism has been raising awareness of the role cultural formations of sexuality play in women's inequality (Ritzenhoff and Hermes). Feminists who regularly include discussions of sexuality in their teaching are familiar with the pedagogical challenges of the subject as well as its importance. This article is intended for…

A mixed-methods approach is evaluated for exploring collaborative behaviour, acceptance and progress surrounding an interactive technology for learning computer programming. A review of literature reveals a compelling case for using mixed-methods approaches when evaluating technology-enhanced-learning environments. Here, ethnographic approaches…

Many studies have shown that small-group direct instruction is effective and efficient for teaching students with and without disabilities, although relatively few studies have been conducted with heterogeneous groups of preschool participants. In addition, previous studies have primarily assessed whether observational learning occurred for…

Asking children to gesture while being taught a concept facilitates their learning. Here, we investigated whether children benefitted equally from producing gestures that reflected speech (speech-gesture matches) versus gestures that complemented speech (speech-gesture mismatches), when learning the concept of palindromes. As in previous studies,…