Contextual cueing refers to the guidance of search by associative learning of the location of task-relevant target items in relation to the consistent arrangement of distractor ("context") items in the search display. The present study investigated whether such target-distractor associations could also be formed in a cross-modal search…

Infant research is providing accumulating evidence that number-space mappings appear early in development. Here, a Posner cueing paradigm was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underpinning the attentional bias induced by nonsymbolic numerical cues in 9-month-old infants (N = 32). Event-related potentials and saccadic reaction time were…

Participants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (n = 121, mean [SD] age: 14.6 [8.0] years) and typically developing (TD) controls (n = 40, 16.4 [13.3] years) were presented with a series of videos representing biological motion on one side of a computer monitor screen and non-biological motion on the other, while their eye movements were…

Speech in everyday conversations is riddled with discourse markers (DMs), such as "well," "you know," and "like." However, in many lab-based studies of speech comprehension, such DMs are typically absent from the carefully articulated and highly controlled speech stimuli. As such, little is known about how these DMs…

Our visual system samples external information, adjusts its sensitivity and constructs a stable representation of the world that allows us to perceive and interact with objects in our environments. Visual information with different levels of complexity is processed through the hierarchically organized visual cortical areas. This dissertation…

Verbs serve as the architectural centerpiece of sentences, making verb learning pivotal for language acquisition. Verb learning requires both the formation of a verb-action mapping and the abstraction of relations between an object and its action. Two competing positions have been proposed to explain the process of verb learning: (a) seeing a…

The fact that the violin is a fretless instrument brings along intonation problems both in its performance and in its education. The introduction of technology into educational environments day by day, has led to the need to try different methods besides the traditional methods for solving intonation problems. The aim of this study is to examine…

Children's ability to discriminate nonsymbolic number (e.g., the number of items in a set) is a commonly studied predictor of later math skills. Number discrimination improves throughout development, but what drives this improvement is unclear. Competing theories suggest that it may be due to a sharpening numerical representation or an improved…

Eye tracking is becoming increasingly popular in physics education research (PER). As technology has advanced considerably in recent years and has become more user friendly, it is anticipated that eye tracking will play an increasingly significant role in assessing student learning at the process level in future studies. The main objective of this…

Emotion can influence various cognitive processes. Communication with children often involves exaggerated emotional expressions and emotive language. Children with autism spectrum disorder often show a reduced tendency to attend to emotional information. Typically developing children aged 7 to 9 years who varied in their level of autism-like…

Background and aims: Although young children's gaze behaviors in experimental task contexts have been shown to be potential biobehavioral markers relevant to autism spectrum disorder (ASD), we know little about their everyday gaze behaviors. The present study aims (1) to document early gaze behaviors that occur within a live, social interactive…

This study explored how pre-K children process an e-book with narration through eye movements, and also the effects of visual cues on preschoolers' visual attention to text, word recognition, and comprehension. Data were collected from eight children attending a university-associated daycare center. Eye tracker was used to record the participants'…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) display difficulties with response to joint attention in natural settings but often perform comparably to typically developing (TD) children in experimental studies of gaze following. Previous work comparing infants at elevated likelihood for ASD versus TD infants has manipulated aspects of the gaze…

The study aimed to improve sequential time perception among deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children with and without cochlear implants (CIs) by administering an intervention programme using virtual-reality (VR) technology. The study included 55 children 7-10 years old who were divided into 3 groups: DHH children with CIs, DHH children without CIs,…

Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of cross-language interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research…