There is a great deal of contemporary research demonstrating the effective use of picturebooks in the classroom; however, there are few studies recording perceptions and use of picturebooks in Initial Teacher Education [ITE]. This study explores the reported use of picturebooks within a New Zealand university-based ITE degree programme. The data…

Impaired face perception in autism spectrum disorders is thought to reflect a perceptual style characterized by componential rather than configural processing of faces. This study investigated face processing in adolescents with autism spectrum disorders using the Thatcher illusion, a perceptual phenomenon exhibiting "inversion effects"…

Understanding text can increase access to educational, vocational, and recreational activities for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, limited research has been conducted investigating instructional practices to remediate or compensate for these comprehension challenges. The current comprehensive literature review expanded…

Instructional design principles for visuals in student materials have been developed through findings based on student-level measures. However, teacher viewpoints may be a rich source of information to better understand how visuals can be optimized for student learning. This study's purpose is to examine teacher viewpoints on visuals. In a…

In order to acquire some aspects of grammar, such as wh-questions and verb tense agreement, children must be able to learn nonadjacent dependencies. This type of learning has been demonstrated in both children and adults, but is reported to be difficult. The current study investigated whether children with autism (ASD) would show a similar pattern…

The present studies examined implicit contextual cueing in adolescents and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In Study 1, 16 individuals with ASD and 20 matched individuals with typical development completed a contextual cueing task using stimulus-identity cues. In Study 2, 12 individuals with ASD and 16 individuals with typical…

It is widely suggested that ASD is characterized by atypical local/global processing, but the published findings are contradictory. In an effort to resolve this question, we tested a large group of children on both a free-choice task and an instructed task using hierarchical local-global stimuli. We find that although children with autism showed a…

Diminished social attention is often considered to be a central deficit in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We further investigate this hypothesis by measuring the distracting power of social and non-social stimuli in the context of a Stroop task among children with ASD and typically developing controls (TDCs). Our results show that Stroop…

No one would argue with the proposition that how we process events in the world is strongly affected by our experience. Nonetheless, recent experience (e.g., from the previous trial) is typically not considered in the analysis of timed cognitive performance in the laboratory. Masson and Kliegl (2013) reported that, in the context of the lexical…

We examined music education majors' ability to reproduce rhythmic stimuli presented in melody and rhythm only conditions. Participants reproduced rhythms of two-measure music examples by immediately echo-performing through a method of their choosing (e.g., clapping, tapping, vocalizing). Forty examples were presented in melody and rhythm only…

The present study examined the hypothesis that inhibitory visual selection mechanisms play a vital role in memory by limiting distractor interference during item encoding. In Experiment 1a we used a modified spatial cueing task in which 9-month-old infants encoded multiple category exemplars in the contexts of an attention orienting mechanism…

We compared multiple-stimulus without replacement (MSWO) and paired-stimulus (PS) procedures to assess stimulus preferences of adults with developmental disabilities. Stimulus preference rankings for six food items obtained by the two procedures were positively correlated for all participants (M = 0.72, range 0.41 to 1). However, four participants…

Flashbacks are a defining feature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but there have been few studies of their neural basis. We tested predictions from a dual representation model of PTSD that, compared with ordinary episodic memories of the same traumatic event, flashbacks would be associated with activity in dorsal visual stream and related…

Using an identification task, we examined lexical effects on the perception of vowel duration as a cue to final consonant voicing in 12 children with specific language impairment (SLI) and 13 age-matched (6;6-9;6) peers with typical language development (TLD). Naturally recorded CVtsets [word-word (WW), nonword-nonword (NN), word-nonword (WN) and…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to explore nonlinguistic learning ability in individuals with aphasia, examining the impact of stimulus typicality and feedback on success with learning. Method: Eighteen individuals with aphasia and 8 nonaphasic controls participated in this study. All participants completed 4 computerized,…