A number of authors have suggested that attention control may be a suitable target for cognitive training in children with autism spectrum disorder. This study provided the first evidence of the feasibility of such training using a battery of tasks intended to target visual attentional control in children with autism spectrum disorder within…

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e., local shapes that constituted intermediate shapes that formed…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

The population of students who are deaf/hard of hearing (D/HH) that have additional disabilities remains at over 40 per cent. One population of particular concern is the group of D/HH students with a comorbid diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The prevalence of ASD in the D/HH population is 1 in 59 (Szymanski et al., 2012. "Deaf…

Student engagement is critical to academic success. High-Active Student Response (ASR) teaching techniques are an effective way to improve student engagement and are an important component of evidence-based practice. High-ASR teaching strategies accompany important assumptions: (1) ASR is an alterable variable; (2) teachers can increase ASR in…

Eye and head movements evoked in response to obvious visual attention shifts. However, there has been little progress on the causes of absent-mindedness so far. The paper proposes an attention awareness system that captures the conditions regarding the interaction of eye gaze and head pose under various attentional switching in computer classroom.…

The present study aimed to examine the relationship between letter processing and word processing skills in deaf and hearing readers. The participants were 105 students (51 of them hearing, 54 of them deaf) who were evenly and randomly recruited from two levels of education (primary = 3rd-4th graders; middle = 6th-7th graders). The students were…

A rich tradition in developmental psychology explores physical reasoning in infancy. However, no research to date has investigated whether infants can reason about physical objects that behave probabilistically, rather than deterministically. Physical events are often quite variable, in that similar-looking objects can be placed in similar…

Purpose: In the present study, the authors aimed to investigate the language confounds of filtered words tests by examining the repetition of real words versus nonsense words as a function of level of filtering. Method: Fifty-five young, native-English-speaking women with normal hearing were required to repeat 80 real-word and 80 nonsense-word…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated adult word learning to determine how neighborhood density and practice across phonologically related training sets influence online learning from input during training versus offline memory evolution during no-training gaps. Method: Sixty-one adults were randomly assigned to learn low- or…

Students with visual impairment (VI) were taught to request using the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) and tangible symbols. Participants were four males with additional disabilities, 5 to 11 years old, who had little to no functional vision. A functional relation between PECS Phase 1 and requesting was established using a multiple…

We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for…

In this paper we show an example of how to use a computational simulation to obtain visual feedback for students' mental models, and compare their predictions with the simulated system's behaviour. Additionally, we use the computational simulation to incrementally modify the students' mental models in order to accommodate new data,…

Perceptual processing in autism is associated with both "strengths" and "weaknesses" but within a literature that varies widely in terms of the assessments used. We report data from 12 children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and 12 age and IQ matched neurotypical controls tested on a set of tasks using the same stimuli…

The current study sought to examine the relative contributions of encoding and retrieval processes in accessing contextual information in the absence of item memory using an extralist cuing procedure in which the retrieval cues used to query memory for contextual information were "related" to the target item but never actually studied.…