In human face-to-face communication, the content of speech is often illustrated by coverbal gestures. Behavioral evidence suggests that gestures provide advantages in the comprehension and memory of speech. Yet, how the human brain integrates abstract auditory and visual information into a common representation is not known. Our study investigates…

A series of experiments examined the role of the motor system in imagined movement, finding a strong relationship between imagined walking performance and the biomechanical information available during actual walking. Experiments 1 through 4 established the finding that real and imagined locomotion differ in absolute walking time. We then tested…

This paper examines music in the home of a Chinese family in Singapore with specific attention to the children (aged five and seven) of the household: an exploration of what constitutes the lived 'musical' memory of a family enmeshed in the technology and media of a globalised world. The study is part of a larger ethnographic study on the musical…

This study compared the effects of static photographs and video prompts on the independent performance of cooking related tasks by six young adults with moderate intellectual disabilities. An adapted alternating treatment design with baseline and final treatment phase was used to measure the percentage of tasks correctly completed by each student…

This study examines whether nonverbal visual and/or auditory channels are more effective in detecting foreign-language anxiety. Recent research suggests that language teachers are often able to successfully decode the nonverbal behaviors indicative of foreign-language anxiety; however, relatively little is known about whether visual and/or…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) is limited, especially for complex objects. Its capacity, however, is greater for faces than for other objects; this advantage may stem from the holistic nature of face processing. If the holistic processing explains this advantage, object expertise--which also relies on holistic processing--should endow experts…

Six older adults with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) were trained to recall a name-face association using the spaced retrieval technique. In this study, we retested these persons in a 6-month follow-up program. For half of the participants, three booster sessions were administered at 6, 12, and 18 weeks after original training to promote…

Objective: Classroom- and laboratory-based efforts to study the attentional problems of children with ADHD are incongruent in elucidating attentional deficits; however, none have explored within- or between-minute variability in the classroom attentional processing in children with ADHD. Method: High and low attention groups of ADHD children…

The research presented in this dissertation examined changes in brain activity associated with learning, forgetting and using a second language. The first experiment investigated the changes that occur when novice adult second language learners acquire and forget second language words. Event-related brain potentials were measured while native…

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been notable for the high rates of traumatic brain injury (TBI) that have been incurred by the troops. Visual impairments often occur following TBI and present new challenges for rehabilitation. We describe a neurological vision rehabilitation therapy that addresses the unique needs of patients with vision…

This four-experiment series sought to evaluate the potential of children with neurosensory deafness and cochlear implants to exhibit auditory-visual and visual-visual stimulus equivalence relations within a matching-to-sample format. Twelve children who became deaf prior to acquiring language (prelingual) and four who became deaf afterwards…

Children with autism have been shown to be less susceptible to Kanisza type contour illusions than children without autism (Happe, 1996). Other authors have suggested that this finding could be explained by the fact that participants with autism were required to make a potentially ambiguous verbal response which may have masked whether or not they…

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his…

This study investigated whether masked priming is mediated by existing memory representations by determining whether nonwords targets would show repetition priming. To avoid the potential confound that nonword repetition priming would be obscured by a familiarity response bias, the standard lexical decision and naming tasks were modified to make…

To examine visual and verbal coding strategies, I asked children with intellectual disabilities and peers matched for MA and CA to perform picture memory span tasks with phonologically similar, visually similar, long, or nonsimilar named items. The CA group showed effects consistent with advanced verbal memory coding (phonological similarity and…